


The Saint of Lost Things

by jessthereckless



Series: It's Not The End Of The World, Dear [6]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 15th Century, Art History, Aziraphale learns Twitter, Crowley is Bad at Being a Demon (Good Omens), Crowley is so bad at being a demon that even humans notice, Dreamsharing, Historical References, Honeymoon, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, also your bookshop, but it does that anyway, lenny nards, sexy gay da vinci, tfw your pets might be flouting all known laws of physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:20:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25219915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessthereckless/pseuds/jessthereckless
Summary: Cats, technology, Biblical misprints, immaculate ball sacs, Leonardo da Vinci, a weekend in Paris, and a thing that happened in Florence. Absolute fluff.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens)/Leonardo da Vinci
Series: It's Not The End Of The World, Dear [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1416700
Comments: 132
Kudos: 411





	1. Chapter 1

Crowley had been married for almost seven months now.

He had spent so many thousands of years among humans that he’d come to believe – almost as much as they did – that there was some vast difference between the states of Married and Not-Married. Once he and Aziraphale had tied the knot, there had even been an anxious couple of split seconds when Crowley worried if the sex wouldn’t be as much fun anymore, now that it was _sanctified_ and all, but then his trousers had hit the bedroom floor and Aziraphale had done a thing with his tongue that assured Crowley that his brand new husband was still every bit as filthy as he had been when they’d been living in blissful sin.

They had honeymooned in Brighton, Venice, Alpha Centauri, and Milan, then disappeared for a few weeks to a yurt in Outer Mongolia, where they’d enjoyed the luxury of being able to cause a few minor earthquakes. They had even picnicked in the Garden of Eden, albeit in dreams. A couple of months ago they had drifted back to London, because it was nice to come home, and things were very much as they had used to be before they got married. Sure, they were both sporting some new jewellery, and Crowley had acquired a new layer of ineffability by marrying his way onto Heaven’s benefits package, but other than that? Same as before. Aziraphale occasionally wondered out loud if he ought to change the sign on the bookshop now that Crowley was officially the ‘& Co.’ in ‘A.Z. Fell & Co.’ but Crowley – who was still getting used to seeing himself as someone who ran a bookshop – assured him that he was quite happy with being an ‘& Co.’ At least for now.

“It’s fine,” he’d said. “It’s appropriate: where else are you going to find another business partner who can do a physically accurate impression of an ampersand?”

That had been Aziraphale’s cue to purse his lips and remind Crowley that if he _must_ turn into a snake in the bookshop, could he at least restrain himself to doing so when they had customers?

On the whole, though, it was business as usual. They did the same old married couple things they’d been doing anyway, like pleasantly alcoholic suppers at their favourite restaurants, and walks in the park. And a few new ones, like Sunday mornings spent lazing in bed with the newspapers, while Aziraphale dropped croissant crumbs all over the sheets. He still bought print editions. Sometimes Crowley suspected he was addicted to the smell of the ink.

“It’s not the same, reading it off screens,” said Aziraphale, who was lounging in bed wearing nothing but his glasses and bits of the _Sunday Times_. “And the adverts. There are _so_ many adverts on the online thing.”

“Yeah, that happens,” said Crowley, absently wondering if the cat was shedding again. She seemed to be leaving fur everywhere lately. That or Aziraphale was moulting, which was a personal question he had never actually broached with his husband, now that he thought about it. As a snake Crowley knew the pleasure of a really good shed, but if he wasn’t sure if angels did it. Also if Aziraphale _did_ happen to moult from time to time, Crowley suspected that the results would probably be feathery rather than furry.

Aziraphale divested himself of the Culture Section and picked croissant crumbs out of his chest hair. “It’s very strange,” he said. “And perhaps I’m being paranoid, but so many of those adverts seem unduly personal.”

“Such as?”

“Socks.”

“Socks?”

“Specifically,” said Aziraphale, turning slightly pink. “They reference some kind of…gentlemen’s support hose.”

“Okay,” said Crowley, trying not to sound as intrigued as he felt. “When you say support…?”

“For the lower legs. And wash your mind out with soap and water.” Aziraphale threw back the duvet and lifted a perfect angel foot. “Look,” he said, prodding at a blue vein in his ankle. “Does that vein look suspicious to you?”

“In what way?”

“Prominent. Bulgy. Possibly varicose.”

Crowley squinted at it. It looked normal enough to him, but his benchmark for what feet were supposed to look like was unusual, to say the least. The last time he’d been out-of-sorts – for reasons involving ice-cream and a phantom pregnancy – all the scales had fallen off his feet and clogged the vacuum cleaner. “Looks all right to me,” he said. “Do angels even get varicose veins?”

“I’ve no idea, but you have to admit that I’m getting a bit long in the tooth, dear. And I’ve spent a lot of time on these poor old feet over the past six thousand years.”

Crowley leaned in and kissed Aziraphale’s earlobe. “Yeah, but you’ve also spent a significant amount of time on your arse, and _that’s_ perfect. Dimples and all.”

Aziraphale giggled. “Stop it,” he said, not meaning it in the least.

“Your ankle looks fine to me. It’s not hurting you, is it?”

“No,” said Aziraphale, wiggling his foot. “It’s just strange that I should be worrying about that one vein in my ankle, and then the next thing I know there’s an advert for surgical stockings on the screen.” He eyed Crowley’s tablet with deep suspicion. “It’s as if the thing knows what I’m thinking.”

“Yeah, it sort of does,” said Crowley. “There’s an algorithm. Did you, by any chance, stuff ‘Do I have varicose veins?’ into the magic Google question box at some point?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? Are you sure? Not even when you were having a hypochondriac moment at three o’clock in the morning?”

Aziraphale sucked on his lower lip in thought for a moment. “Oh. Maybe?”

“There you go then,” said Crowley. “That’s all it takes. It’s all part of the algorithm. It makes notes of what you search for and tailors your ads accordingly.”

“It _knows_ what I search for?”

“Yep.”

“Isn’t that a little…intrusive?”

“Oh yeah,” said Crowley. “Extremely. But that’s the miracle of modern technology.”

“And does it…” Aziraphale hesitated and once again turned slightly pink around the edges. “Does it know _everything_?”

“Not everything, but it definitely knows about the pornography, Aziraphale.”

In Aziraphale, both nurture and heavenly nature had collided to create one of the least convincing liars to ever walk the face of the earth. He could lie unconvincingly without saying a single word, and he did so now, widening his eyes and blinking rapidly in a flustered way that said he had once searched for cream pies – perhaps even with patisserie genuinely on his mind – and subsequently tumbled cheerfully down a pornographic online rabbit hole. “I don’t think I like it,” he said, fluffing invisible feathers. “I think we’ll stick with good old-fashioned print from now on. For all _The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom_ is perfectly revolting, at least it isn’t sentient enough to make sly insinuations about the state of one’s circulation.”

“It’s just technology, angel,” said Crowley, rustling through the newspaper. “Even this was new, once.”

“A long time ago, dear.”

Crowley turned the page and startled. Yes, it had been a long time ago, but a mere blink in the scheme of things, and there – on the page in front of him – was a vivid reminder of those days when the printing press had been young and the humans all seemed determined to leave the fourteenth century behind them where it belonged. And none more so than one particular human.

“Oh, look,” said Aziraphale. “They found a new Leonardo drawing.”

It was a study of hands – one pointing, another outstretched, fingers spread, palm down. Crowley eyed it with scepticism, because if there was one thing he had learned about humans, it was that even the most extraordinary of them were still human. From what he could see the sketch looked too pristine to be from the busy mind of a man who had noticed everything. Leonardo’s margins were full of people who had caught his eye on the street, dick jokes, grocery items, love notes, ruminations on the study of anatomy. He had seldom left a blank space for anything, unless it was for the purposes of composition, and even his blank spaces drew the eye in some way.

“They found it in the collection of an Italian nobleman – attributed, but never confirmed,” said Aziraphale. “Do you think it’s genuine? Apparently it has the distinctive left-handed cross hatching.”

“I don’t know,” said Crowley. “I’m not an art expert. Just going off of pure instinct I’d say no. Doesn’t look messy enough to be the product of his mind.”

“Messy is not a word I would have used to describe the mind of Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Yeah, well. You didn’t know him like I did, did you?”

“Evidently not,” said Aziraphale, with a sudden starchiness that made Crowley wonder how he could possibly be jealous of someone who had been dead for five hundred years. But he was. Aziraphale was weird like that.

There had been something rumbling between them lately, one of those strange, hidden speed bumps that they hit every now and again. Something changing, slowly and subtly, leaving a whiff of ozone on tongues as sensitive as Crowley’s. It was that faint, background scent that reality emitted whenever it was bent or folded, or bruised beyond recognition by the combined power of two entities as ancient as they were. Nothing as big as their regular miracles, like when Crowley’s orgasms would trip all the switches in the fuse box, and sometimes give them reason to run for the fire extinguisher, or when an amorous angel would accidently turn the upstairs hallway into a small rainforest. No, it was just an intermittent background hum, and sometimes Crowley would taste it in the air in the middle of the night, think _what now?_ and roll over to drape himself over the sleeping warmth of his husband.

It was strange, but they were on intimate terms with strange. At least Aziraphale – who had taken a while to get the hang of dreaming – had stopped manifesting things in his sleep, and Crowley – who had taken a while to get the hang of eating – had learned not to mistake the symptoms of lactose intolerance for those of being pregnant with an eldritch abomination. “Marriage is a very human institution,” Aziraphale said. “And we’re not human. It stands to reason that it might take us a while to get to grips with it.”

On Tuesday, or perhaps it was Wednesday, Aziraphale returned to the ever-vexed question of the sign above the bookshop door. “I still think you should be on it,” he said.

“I am on it,” said Crowley, who was lounging on the couch in the back, one eye on a recipe for slow cooker French onion soup and the other on the cat. She’d been shedding up a storm again and he marvelled how she even had any fur left, since most of it seemed to be stuck to his jeans. “I told you – I’m the ‘and Co.’ Besides, you can’t fit ‘Crowley and Fell’ up over the door without making the font too small to read. You’d have to put it over the window or something.”

Aziraphale glanced up from his newest acquisition, a seventeenth century bible so rare that it required the white cotton glove treatment. “Crowley and Fell?” he said. “Oh no. I don’t think that would work. I was here first, after all. It should be A.Z. Fell and Crowley, if anything.”

“That’s even more letters,” said Crowley. “And Crowley and Fell sounds better. It’s got a rhythm to it. Falls off the tongue faster. It’s just good marketing.”

“It would be good marketing if I were attempting to sell books, which I am not.”

“Right.” Crowley returned to the mysteries of caramelising onions for a moment, before being distracted by the more pressing puzzle of the cat. He ran his fingers through her fur – which seemed longer and thicker lately – and found that she seemed to be growing an undercoat like a Maine Coon or a Persian. Which was odd, because when she’d first moved in with them she’d just been a regular tortoiseshell moggy. He searched for ‘Why is my cat’s hair getting thicker?’ and discovered there were a myriad of reasons behind it, most of which probably meant that Madam would require a trip to the vet. And that Crowley would require a set of new, extra thick gardening gloves in order to wrangle her into the cat carrier.

“You’re not ill, are you?” he said. “You don’t look peaky to me. Not off your food.”

The cat mrrred in the back of her throat and rolled over on the couch, baring a temptingly fluffy expanse of belly. Crowley knew it to be a trap, and refused to fall for it, at least this time.

“Cat’s shedding again,” he said.

“Mm?” Aziraphale was only pretending to listen. He was absorbed in his new acquisition, his little round glasses slipping down the end of his nose, his lips parted in an absent smile, and the very tip of his tongue caught between his perfect teeth. For sixty centuries – on and off – Crowley had watched him from the shadows, or from behind the cover of dark glasses, and still drank in the sight of him with the same thirst as he had felt in Eden. Aziraphale’s face was endlessly expressive, able to convey worlds of meaning with nothing more than a fluttered lash, a pursed lip, or an arched eyebrow. He glowed with pleasure at the open pages, so that Crowley was torn between the joy of being married to him and the jealous urge to organise a good old-fashioned book burning.

“So what have you got there?” Crowley asked.

“Hm? Oh, this.” Aziraphale carefully turned a page with a gloved hand. “This is one of only four editions of the Sleepy Groats Bible.”

“Sleepy Groats?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” said Crowley, slithering off the couch. “That’s what I thought you said. Do I want to know why it’s called that?”

“Matthew twenty-five,” said Aziraphale. “‘Before him all the nations shall be gathered, and he will separate them from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.’ Only in this particular bible there is an amusing double misprint that means the passage now reads ‘as a shepherd separates the sleep from the groats.’”

“Fuck me.”

“Not now, dear. I’ve got gloves on.”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” said Crowley, moving closer and running a fond hand over Aziraphale’s tweed clad bottom. “Although that now you mention it…”

“Crowley, this is a very old book…”

“Mmm…” said Crowley, who didn’t see what the age of the book had to do with what he was currently doing to the nape of the angel’s neck. He nosed and nuzzled, breathing in the sandalwood scent of Jermyn Street cologne.

“What are you doing?”

“Sniffing you. You’ve still got that New Husband smell. I like it.”

“You’re going to make the place all humid,” said Aziraphale.

“I like humid.”

“Yes, well…old bibles generally don’t.”

“Yeah, but you do,” said Crowley, grinding hopefully against his rear. “We should go somewhere hot and steamy. Somewhere where you don’t even need any other reason to wander around in the nude.”

Aziraphale had turned out to be a surprisingly enthusiastic nudist. Perhaps it was because he’d spent six thousand years cultivating good posture and worrying about being appropriately dressed that – as soon as Crowley had given him license to do so – he had revelled in every opportunity to take off all his clothes and loll around in the buff. Being an angel, he always looked as though he was missing a cloud to lounge on, especially when he went all the way and aired out his wings at the same time.

Today, though, he didn’t take up the invitation. He remained stubbornly clothed, and Crowley was determined to get into the bottom of it. “Why aren’t you stripping off already?” he said. “Are you still sulking?”

“I was never sulking in the first place,” said Aziraphale, closing the bible and carefully returning it to its wrappings.

“Bollocks. I could hear you sulking from across the room.”

“I was not sulking, Crowley.” Aziraphale began to peel off his gloves. “I was just _saying_ – I think you should be on the sign.”

“Noted.”

Aziraphale stiffened, the fingertip of a glove still caught between his teeth. He delicately spat it out and simmered slightly. “Don’t say noted,” he said. “It’s very passive aggressive.”

“Sorry,” said Crowley. “Forgot that was your job.”

“Why are you being like this? It’s _just a sign_.”

“Yeah. It is. So why are _you_ making such a big deal about it?” said Crowley, and decided enough was enough. He sighed and shook his head. “Is this what we choose to get on one another’s nerves about? Really?”

Aziraphale appeared to relax. “You’re right,” he said, in tones of profound self-disgust. “Quite right. What in the world is wrong with us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’re just not suited to trying to run a bookshop together. You know me and books. I don’t even read.”

“You do read. You read all the time. You don’t have to pretend to be cooler than you actually are with me, you know. And besides, reading is tremendously cool.”

Crowley squirmed. “You know you’ve just negated that statement by having it come out of your mouth, don’t you?” he said, wondering for the millionth time how it was that he’d lost his head and his heart to the uncoolest entity in Heaven, Earth and Hell.

“I may not look as nifty as you do in Dolce e Gabanna, my dear,” said Aziraphale, compounding the offence by using the word ‘nifty’. “But I have my moments of occasional swagger. I am, as they say these days, a snack.”

Crowley’s squirm threatened to turn into a full body cringe. And the worst part of it – as always – was that he was still _into it_. Deeply. Hopelessly. “You’re not a snack, Aziraphale,” he found himself saying. “You’re…you’re a ten course Michelin star tasting menu, with a matching wine flight chosen from some of the rarest and most exclusive cellars on the planet.”

The angel glowed. Neither of them looked their real age, but there could be moments in unforgiving lights when the lines around Aziraphale’s eyes looked deeper than usual, or the line of his jaw not quite as firm as it had once been. Then there were moments like now, when he was lit up with love and his natural element bathed him in such a flattering light that the millennia fell away and he was every bit as beguiling as he had been when they first met and he’d accidentally revealed to Crowley that he was really bad at his job. “Darling,” he said, and wound his arms around Crowley’s neck.

“You know what we should do?” said Crowley, after a long, satisfyingly tongue-swirly kiss.

Aziraphale reached up and removed Crowley’s glasses. “I can think of a few things.”

“We should go on a honeymoon.”

“We’ve had a honeymoon.”

“No reason we can’t have another one,” said Crowley. “I know it was a very short engagement, but it was a six thousand year courtship, and if that doesn’t justify at _least_ five hundred years of honeymoon then I don’t know what does.”

Aziraphale untangled himself and dropped into the nearest chair. “Sounds reasonable. Where should we go?”

“Ah, you’ll like this. Bora Bora.”

“Which is where?”

“Polynesia.”

Aziraphale wriggled happily in his seat. “Oh, the South Seas. How romantic.”

“It is,” said Crowley. “They have these luxury beach huts on stilts over the water, and you have your own private piece of ocean to float around in. And the huts have glass floors, so you can walk on water. I mean, I know you can do that anyway, but I thought you might want to do it the human way for once.”

“Well, there is something to be said for doing some things the human way,” said Aziraphale, who looked as though he had something specific – and dirty – in mind. He reached out, hooked two fingers under the front of Crowley’s belt and pulled him close. “Tell me something…”

“Mmm?”

“Do you think they serve drinks in Bora Bora with those little…”

“…frou frou umbrellas in them?” said Crowley, straddling his lap. “Oh, definitely. I think it might even be illegal to serve drinks _without_ little frou frou umbrellas in them, in Bora Bora.”

“Really?” said Aziraphale, his fingers at work on Crowley’s belt buckle.

“Really. There might even be a law that says you also have to drink them out of scooped out pineapples, or coconut shells, but don’t quote me on that. I don’t claim to be an expert on Polynesian booze law.”

Aziraphale glowed even brighter. And smouldered a bit, too, for good measure. “I’m so in love with you that it’s almost revolting,” he said. “It’s a wonder that we don’t make people sick.”

Things were about get interesting, but then someone made a loud, wheezy – and totally apposite – gagging noise. It was the cat. She was doing that thing again, that full body _hurk_ thing that made the entire back half of her body look enormous for a moment, before it contracted as though squeezed by a giant, invisible fist.

“That cat has no sense of occasion,” said Crowley.

“She’s a cat. I’m not exactly sure what you were expecting.”

Madam hurked a couple more times and disgorged an enormous ball of tortoiseshell hair onto a copy of the Collected Poems of Baudelaire. Her fur looked even thicker, the pale undercoat shining through in ever larger patches. Crowley went over to her and ran a hand over her back. Her bum went up in the air, tail waving like a charmed, fluffy snake. She seemed fine, other than the fur thing. “It’s like she’s licking her own coat off.”

“Again, I think that’s just something that cats do, dear.”

“Maybe,” said Crowley, and there was that odd whiff of static and ozone again, fizzing on the tip of his tongue. He knew that plenty of bookshops had cats, but he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a good idea to take two things that had such a slippery relationship with the laws of physics and put them both together in the presence of an angel and demon, especially since the angel had demonstrated on more than one occasion that he was more than capable of accidentally dreaming whole new sections of the bookshop into existence.

On Friday, Aziraphale announced that he was peckish in a way that only authentic brioche could satisfy, and so they went to Paris. It was easier than it used to be, what with the Eurostar and the absence of severed heads rolling all over the cobbles, although these days they did have to call on the girl next-door and ask if she wouldn’t mind feeding the cat.

“It’s funny how grown up that feels,” said Aziraphale, when they were strolling hand in hand through the Louvre.

“Grown up?” said Crowley. “You do know that between us we’re older than the collective age of all of the paintings in this room, right?”

“Yes, I know that. I’m aware it’s an odd sentiment, at our age, but it’s…well…it’s _grown up_ – having something to take care of in that way.”

“Yeah, just be thankful it’s not a kid.” They approached a denser crowd, and Crowley knew without referring to the tour guide what the people had come to see. Her. The headache. The painting he could never get right.

“Do you want to see?” said Aziraphale.

Crowley shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got one at home. Unless you want to? Compare the smiles?”

“Oh, no. Such a crowd. Reminds me of when this place used to be a palace. Do you remember? Louis the Fourteenth and his high heeled shoes? Red soles and red heels, like yours. Always amuses me how these things roll back around.”

They wandered on through the Denon Wing, pausing here and there when Crowley remembered the banker or warlord who had commissioned this particular Crucifixion or that Adoration of the Magi. “Ah, that good old Renaissance religious hustle,” he said. “Poison your relatives, strangle your wife, make your money through murder and usury, but pour some money into an artist’s pocket for a nice religious masterpiece and earn yourself some time off in Purgatory.”

“Ye-es,” said Aziraphale, peering into Veronese’s huge, swarming _Wedding at Cana._ “You know, I think I remember this one.” He leaned closer to read the plaque. “Commissioned by Benedictine monks in Venice, to adorn their new refectory. In their new monastery. Which was built by Palladio.”

“ _The_ Palladio?”

“Was there any other?”

Crowley whistled. “So this was in the new dining room? It’s…a lot, isn’t it? Very busy. Expensive, I expect.”

“Yes.”

“And after they’d dropped all that cash having one of the world’s greatest architects build them a new monastery. What was that bit in the Bible about the camel and the eye of the needle again?”

“Well, it’s like you say,” Aziraphale said, moving on. “That old religious hustle.”

“Yep. Splash the cash for God. Doesn’t work, by the way.”

“No, I know.”

“Lot of Medicis in Hell, and look how much religious art they commissioned. We ended up with the full set – all four Popes.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Four?”

“Yeah.” Crowley counted them off on his fingers. “Leo the Tenth, Clement the Seventh, Pius the Fourth, and Leo the Eleventh.”

“Leo the Eleventh? I don’t remember him.”

“Well, you wouldn’t. He was only pope for twenty-seven days.”

“Oh. I see. One of _those_.”

“Yep,” said Crowley. “That’s gerontocracy for you. Elect a doddery senior citizen to the papal throne and watch himself sneeze himself to death less than a month later. Still, kept the Curia and the candlemakers busy, didn’t it?”

“Just as well,” said Aziraphale. “The devil made more than enough work for idle hands back in those days. No offense, of course.”

“None taken. Actually, I’m flattered that you noticed.”

Aziraphale stopped in front of a painting. A Leonardo, _The Madonna of the Rocks_. It was one of a pair, a matched set. The other one was in the National Gallery in London, where the two of them often spent lazy afternoons roaming through the Titians and Botticellis, Crowley sneaking peeks at the sketch books of the ever-present art students from nearby St. Martin’s. They came to copy the masterpieces and to learn to draw what they saw, and Crowley always looked over their shoulders whenever he could, just in case there was somebody there who might have had an eye quite like his. But there never was. Nobody had an eye quite like Leonardo’s.

“Well, would you look at that?” Aziraphale said.

“At what?”

“The hands. Doesn’t that look like that sketch they found the other day?”

Sure enough, it was. The Virgin’s hand was held, outstretched and foreshortened, above the head of the baby Jesus, who sat beside an angel who was pointing to the figure of an infant John the Baptist. The angel’s hand was long fingered and delicate, and the androgynous face was framed by the swirling curls that Leonardo had always loved to paint. Five hundred years and Crowley could still feel the light tug on his scalp, a lock of his hair curled around a paint stained finger. _Don’t ever cut your hair, Tonio._

“Same pose and everything,” said Aziraphale. “Although I have to say it doesn’t look much like Uriel.”

“No,” said Crowley, miles and centuries away. Hands reaching up to remove his glasses. Finding himself caught in a beam of curiosity so bright it had to be heavenly, or infernal. But it was neither. It was human. Just human.

“The foreshortening really is remarkable,” Aziraphale was saying. “So lifelike. It’s as though his eyes worked differently to other people’s. Better.”

“Yeah.”

“What was he really like?”

Crowley swallowed. His sinuses ached, for some reason. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Human.”

It was an inadequate explanation for all the things Leonardo had been, but in that moment it was all he had. And Aziraphale seemed to sense his feelings, because he slipped his hand into Crowley’s and said, “Extraordinary things, humans.”

They moved on, leaving Crowley shaken. Another one of those invisible speed bumps, only this time he was still feeling the vibrations hours later. He was alone, sipping Scotch under the sloped ceiling of a perfectly Parisian hotel room in the Latin Quarter. Aziraphale had taken himself off to soak his feet and worry about his veins in the bath, and for once Crowley didn’t follow, worried that his strange mood would turn contagious and ruin the nice time they were supposed to be having. Besides, Paris was as good a place as any to be moody. The sky was iron grey and from his perch on the window seat Crowley had a good view of the scaffolded hulk of Notre Dame. It had been a hell of a fire, but the old lady was still standing, and Crowley still remembered seeing that picture on Twitter – of the cross shining beneath the burned out roof, and the humans had called it a miracle, because they were idiots like that. Not that he was in any position to judge, because he was exactly the same kind of idiot, determined to see light at the end of the tunnel, even if they were the lights of an oncoming train. And then there had been the beehives on the cathedral roof. Somehow the bees had survived the fire, and he remembered that, too, because there could have only been one being in the universe responsible for such a miracle, and Crowley remembered thinking _that’s it – I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to have to tell him how I feel. Maybe when the world is about to end I can finally say the words._

And now they were here, with Aziraphale humming like a honeybee in the bathtub, little snatches of mumbled song – _Key Largo, Montego, baby why don’t we go_ – telling Crowley that he’d really taken that mental picture of Bora Bora to heart. Crowley looked at the rings on his finger – the plain gold band and the winged one that had been an improvised engagement ring – and realised he was beyond hope. Or beyond hope _less_. He was a disaster of a demon. He was supposed to be a loveless nihilist, but he didn’t have it in him. Never had. Maybe he’d been made all wrong on purpose, once as an angel who asked too many questions, and then as a demon who seemed designed to dance in the light of the absurdly buoyant creature currently singing The Beach Boys in the hotel bathroom.

Aziraphale had stopped singing. Crowley sank deeper into his drink and listened to the water drain away, then Aziraphale emerged, wrapped in a hotel dressing gown and drying the inside of his ear with a cotton bud. “The water pressure’s not bad in there,” he said. “Last hotel in Paris we stayed in it was like sending the water a written invitation every time you turned the tap on. Then you had to wait for several hours while it decided to RSVP. Do you remember?”

“Yep,” said Crowley, who didn’t, and didn’t care about the water pressure, because he was too busy enjoying the view. Aziraphale had settled on the side of the bed to rub lotion on his feet. His fingers made sloppy, suggestive noises as he worked the complimentary body lotion between his toes, and the scent of the goo drifted to Crowley’s sensitive nostrils and set several of his senses – and body parts – on end. Aziraphale’s hair was damp, the curls as tight as those of the angel in the painting. The white towelling robe had come open, revealing the inside of one thigh all the way up to the pink bulge of his balls. He obviously felt Crowley staring, because he pursed his lips and turned prim, the way he often did before getting gleefully filthy.

“And how many of those have you had?” he said, nodding to the glass in Crowley’s hand.

“Just the one.”

“Double or triple?”

Crowley pounced. He landed on top of Aziraphale, pinning him to the bed. The robe was all the way open now, and Aziraphale’s body was warm, bath-flushed, completely sexy. “Stop pretending to be pious,” said Crowley, grinding his hips. “I know you’re not.”

Aziraphale couldn’t help himself. He kept right on trying to look like he disapproved, even though he now had a boner all the way up to his belly button and was merrily grinding right back. “You smell like whisky,” he said, his fingers in Crowley’s hair.

Crowley leaned down, buried his nose in his neck and breathed him in. “Mmm…and you smell like grapefruit,” he said, kissing his way down over a collarbone. “And honey.” He bit gently on a nipple, making Aziraphale’s breath catch. “And cream.”

“Really? How on earth did I manage that?”

“I expect it’s the lotion.” Aziraphale was trying to get at him, but his fingers were too slippery. Crowley reached down, unbuckled and unbuttoned and took it out for him, and Aziraphale grabbed the about-to-spill bottle and tipped it – perhaps by accident – over the tops of his thighs.

“Can you really smell all of those things?” Aziraphale said. He bit his lip and – no, not an accident at all – pressed his thighs together and pulled his cock and balls up, directing Crowley to the slick space beneath them.

“Yep.” Crowley pushed, and shuddered. The lotion was still cold, but Aziraphale was warm behind the chill, soft between his thighs and hard where he butted up against Crowley’s stomach. “And more…there’s a…” Oh, getting warmer already. “…slight whisper of bergamot in the background…”

“…mmm…”

“…base notes of musk…” How was this so good? His arse seemed to have developed a mind of its own already, impelling him deeper into the tight, slippery space. “…strong breath of angel cock…oh no, wait…that’s you, isn’t it?”

“Fuck me.” Aziraphale scrambled to push Crowley’s t-shirt out of the way: it kept slipping down and getting in the way of his attempts to rub himself off against Crowley’s belly. Crowley pulled it off, tossed it aside and went for it, too horny and needy to do anything else. Everything was sticky and sloppy and Aziraphale wasn’t even trying to slow him down, panting along in time with Crowley’s thrusts. When Crowley bent his head to kiss and fuck at the same time, Aziraphale let out a throaty moan that tripped the switch in the centre of Crowley’s brain and then it was all happening, all at once and too fast. He’d barely finished coming the first time before Aziraphale sought out the tip of his tongue with his own and fed him a second orgasm, one of those rushing golden waves of celestial ecstasy that sometimes threatened to set fire to his spine from the inside. Crowley cried out and tried to withdraw before it got too much, and his come splattered all over Aziraphale, so that when he went down to take his revenge he tasted himself on Aziraphale’s cock. The angel loved to make a mess, and he’d definitely done that. The insides of his thighs were wet and Crowley was drowning in the scents of lotion and lust as he sucked. Aziraphale arched, pushing himself deeper into Crowley’s mouth, grabbed a handful of his hair and whispered – “…darling, yes, yes, darling, love…oh my, oh, oh, ohhh…” He came as if he, just like Crowley, had been surprised by the speed of it all, and Crowley teased him, swallowing him down and licking him clean until he flinched.

Satisfied, Crowley released him, letting him subside. He rested his head against the furred pillow of Aziraphale’s belly, and lay there for a long while, letting Aziraphale play with his hair. Outside it had started to rain, turning the sound of tyres on the Paris streets into a wet hiss. Night was falling and the lights were coming on, and while the rumbles beneath Crowley’s other ear said that his husband was definitely thinking of dinner, Aziraphale seemed to sense that Crowley was feeling brittle and simply let him lie there. When he stretched the light caught the glaze of come that Crowley had left on the inside of his soft, white-striped inner thigh, and Crowley reached out to touch it, if only to remind himself that he’d been there.

“Sticky,” said Aziraphale, in a half-asleep voice, and then – with that fluting note of half-complaint that was all him; “And I’ve _just_ had a bath, too.”

Crowley pressed his thumb into the flesh, so that the dried liquid cracked like old varnish. “You can have another one.”

“I’ll wrinkle up like a scrotum.”

“A clean scrotum, though.”

Aziraphale’s belly shook with a faint laugh. “Oh yes. Immaculate.”

Crowley cupped him in his hand, feeling the shape of the balls, vulnerable in their insubstantial bag of skin. “Can an angel’s ball sac _be_ anything but immaculate?” he said. “Celestial testicles…I don’t know.” He ducked his head to kiss them, then kissed the shaft of Aziraphale’s cock, soft and short in repose. He kissed his navel and the patch of golden hair above his heart, up to his lips and the tip of his nose and his fluttering lashes. He was suddenly conscious that he was wearing far too many clothes, and that he needed to be as naked as Aziraphale was, all the better to bury himself in the touch of him, the smell of him, the warm, squishy girth and softness of him. Aziraphale hummed with pleasure as they kissed and snuggled, vibrating at his perfect pitch like a string plucked just right. His fingers curled in Crowley’s hair, and when he looked up the streetlight caught on the ends of his eyelashes, turning Crowley’s poor, oversensitive heart to molten goo all over again. Perhaps it was because Crowley had presided over so many of such wishes in his long career, but sometimes he couldn’t help looking at Aziraphale and thinking _what’s the catch?_ Where was the dirty trick, the price he’d have to pay for such this, because there had to be one for such complete, unrelenting bliss.

Aziraphale saw the wet glitter in his eyes and reached up, stroking Crowley’s lower eyelid with the pad of his thumb. “What’s got into you?”

Crowley swallowed hard. “I don’t know. Paris makes me sentimental. And I’m old.”

“You and me both, dear. There’s no fool like an old fool, after all.” Aziraphale curled a hand around the nape of Crowley’s neck, pulled him down and licked up the sudden tears. “Can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

“I told you, I don’t know.” Crowley sighed, wiped his eyes with the back of his arm and flopped back on the bed. “Maybe I’m pregnant again.”

“Darling, you weren’t pregnant the last time. You were just…”

“…what? Emotionally unstable?”

“Well, I was going to say ‘lactose intolerant,’” said Aziraphale. “But yours is actually nearer the mark.”

“Thanks,” said Crowley, taking no pleasure in being right. Part of him had almost hoped that putting a ring on it might have somehow calmed him down a bit, made him a bit more sedate and…husbandly. And it hadn’t. He was still the same hot mess of roiling _feelings_ that he’d always been.

“Is it him?” asked Aziraphale, in a thin, probing sort of way that immediately put Crowley’s guard up.

“Who?”

“Leonardo. I know he was your friend.”

Crowley sat up. “Demons don’t have friends,” he said. “Not human ones.”

“Why not?” Aziraphale said, but Crowley pretended not to hear and escaped to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He went to clean up a bit, and as he did so he caught sight of himself in the mirror, raising a hand to brush his hair out of his face. It was his right hand, the ringless one, and there was something about it, some knotty delicacy that put him in mind of Leonardo. _Some painters only see the expression in the face, but there are stories in every attitude of the hands and body. And your hands? They speak volumes._

Oh shit. _Why not?_ Aziraphale had said, and the answer was simple, and brutal. Because they died. Because humans died, and it would never, ever be fair.

He gave himself a hard mental shake – _snap the fuck out of it, Anthony_ – and sought refuge in the practical. “Are we going out to dinner tonight or what?” he called, through the closed bathroom door.

There was a pause. “Uh…oh. Did you want to? I thought we could order room service.”

Yeah, that worked. Room service spoke directly to Aziraphale’s laziest instincts, and Crowley could only encourage him, especially since he had no particular inclination to get dressed or go out again. He wriggled out of his jeans and opened the bathroom door, stark naked. “Suits me. I’m not dressed for dinn…what are you doing?”

It was obvious what Aziraphale was doing. He was doing a thing that almost everyone did these days, but it was fucking weird, because it was _Aziraphale_ doing it. It was like strolling into the old Roman Senate and catching Julius Caesar smoking a cigarette. Aziraphale was sitting up in bed, bare chested, glasses reflecting the glow of the screen in front of him, and both thumbs busy. _Texting._

Aziraphale was texting…?

“I am sliding into someone’s DMs,” he announced, making the whole situation even more bizarre.

Crowley sidled over the bed. “Is this real?” he said. “Or am I having a stroke?”

Aziraphale gave him one of those over-the-glasses looks that were supposed to go with old Bibles, not iPhones. Crowley had bought him the thing in the hopes that he’d learn how to use it, but he hadn’t, until now. “It’s just technology, Crowley,” he said. “You said so yourself.”

“Yes, I know,” said Crowley, and spotted a little blue bird reflected in Aziraphale’s glasses. “But whose DMs are you sliding into? And since when did you have social media.”

“I’m on Twitter now,” said Aziraphale, looking pleased. “I have _three hundred_ followers. I think I might be quite good at it.”

Crowley didn’t have the heart to tell him. Besides, it wasn’t exactly the most pressing matter right now. “Yes, but _whose DMs_ , angel?”

“A professor of art history,” said Aziraphale. “I’m sure they’ve noticed it already, but I thought it would be helpful to point out that the new Leonardo sketch looks an awful lot like a study for the hands of the Virgin and the angel in the _Madonna of the Rocks_.”

“Whatever,” said Crowley, slithering into bed beside him. “Show me your tweets. Immediately.”

“You make it sound very rude.”

“It could be.” Crowley kissed his shoulder and tried to sneak a peek. “How dirty are your tweets?”

“Not dirty at all,” said Aziraphale. “Immaculate, I should say. Cleaner than my ball sac, in fact.”

“ _Show me._ ”

Aziraphale sighed and surrendered the phone.

> A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
> 
> Fun fact – there is no proper name for the backs of the knees.
> 
> A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho

> Having consistently fed the ducks in St. James’s Park for some considerable length of time, can now confirm that they favour Hovis (brown), and doubly so if there’s a bit of Marmite involved!

> A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
> 
> Hovis always puts me in mind of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, but that’s the dreadful power of advertising, I suppose. Orwell’s rattle of a stick in a swill bucket.

> A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
> 
> Husband has discovered how to make chimichurri sauce. Quite delicious and so much fun to say!

“Amazing,” said Crowley. “Just…amazing.”

“Am I doing it right?”

“You’re…doing it your way,” said Crowley. “Which is perfect, because it’s yours.”

The apprehension melted from Aziraphale’s face faster than frost under a blow torch. “Oh, darling,” he said. “Do you really mean it?”

“Of course I do. And congratulations – the inside of your head is even more peculiar than I ever imagined, even that time when I wandered in there and caught you playing chess with a bee.” Crowley scrolled down through the tweets and spotted the Leonardo sketch among them. Yes, he could see it now – Aziraphale was right. There was the hand of the Virgin Mary, outstretched in a blessing, and the pointing finger of the angel, with a…wait, what was that? It was a splotch of dark shadow on the pad of the index finger, extending a good halfway past the first joint. “Was that there before?” he said. “The shadow. I never noticed it before.”

“No, it was always there,” said Aziraphale. “Has the art historians in a bit of a tizzy, apparently. They can’t decide if it’s just some artefact of ageing, or whether Leonardo did it on purpose. And what it means if he did. _If_ it was Leonardo, of course.”

“It was,” said Crowley, with a whole new certainty.

“Crowley, do you know something about this?”

“Yeah.” Crowley pointed his right index finger and peered back and forth between it and the drawing. Aziraphale’s eyes widened. “I think I do.”


	2. Chapter 2

The fourteenth century had been a bust.

The fifteenth was much, much better. So much better that one day Crowley rolled out of bed one day in 1475 and realised the century was almost over. He’d been having a lovely time wandering around Italy, drinking lots of cold red wine and exploring a new angle with religious art. The humans – as they almost always did – had found a loophole. This one had evolved out of a shifting perspective on the old sin of usury, the shift being in a general ‘look, it doesn’t matter if I do it, because I’m really, really rich’ sort of direction. It did matter, but Crowley wasn’t about to tell them that. They weren’t going to get away with the things they’d done in life just because they dedicated a new church, or commissioned an Annunciation or an altarpiece, any more than one of the killers of Thomas Beckett was going to get a reprieve from some toasty times in the afterlife because his son dedicated a whole North transept in his bishop bashing father’s name. It didn’t work like that, and never had, but what was _really_ interesting these days was the art. 

It was getting good. Much better than it used to be, when it used to be crude little stick figures with nothing much to distinguish them one from the other. You could tell a king because he was wearing a crown in his picture, but the resemblance to the actual person was fleeting at best. But not these days. These days there was this word bouncing around the place – _rinascita_ – and the figures in the paintings were starting to not only look like the people they depicted, but sometimes like they could step out of the paintings and walk around the room. They looked like they were about to start breathing. It was so miraculous that it almost made up for the fourteenth century, and Crowley was impressed. Of course, his first thought – what with it being his job and everything – was how he could pervert it in some way so as to stain the largest number of souls at one time. No, it wasn’t _craftsmanship_ , as the Lords of Hell would have it, but Crowley had had a bellyful of craftsmanship. All that hanging around drafty monasteries trying to coax a single stigmatic into venal thoughts, and everything that went along with that. The antisocial hours. The hessian underwear. Who could really be bothered? There were easier ways to do it these days, especially now that the artists were going all out to make their subjects look so realistic. Find an artist, put lascivious thoughts in his head while he was painting a picture of the Madonna or whatever, and there you had it. A busty virgin, or one of those writhing and muscular Saint Sebastians that turned many a Florentine gentleman’s head. You didn’t have to fart about putting mucky thoughts in some monk’s head when you could simply prod an artist in the right – or wrong – direction, and suddenly _everyone_ who saw the painting was thinking inappropriate thoughts about religious art. It was beautiful. Efficient. Mass corruption. Best thing since banking for sending souls south.

Crowley had always been glad of a reason to visit Florence, but currently he had yet another cause to hang around: he’d heard that Aziraphale was here.

You could usually tell where Aziraphale had been. The shortage of cake, for one thing. The smiling babies who – just a few instances before – had been beet red and shrieking. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, and if you were lucky enough to have a serpent’s tongue, you could pick him up from the faint whiff of stardust and ozone that trailed in the wake of a miracle, the scent of the impossible made possible.

The angel smell tickled Crowley’s sinuses as he wandered through the crowded marketplace, and not even the stink of livestock, roasted meats and pungent Italian cheeses could drown it out. He followed it past fruit vendors and hellfire preachers and finally found the source of it, standing out like a sore thumb.

Aziraphale was dressed in the most up to date Florentine fashion, but still managed to be _off_ somehow. It had been a thousand years since the fall of the Roman Empire, but Aziraphale still spoke Italian with an accent so ancient that it was verging on Etruscan. There was always something he managed to get wrong, not least the way his face lit up when he saw Crowley. They were supposed to be enemies, but they’d fallen into something almost-but-not-exactly like friendship. A you-scratch-my-back and yeah-okay-I’ll-do-your-job-so-you-don’t-have-to sort of arrangement. Aziraphale quickly plastered a neutral expression on his face and turned away from the baker’s stall, and Crowley slipped through the crowds and fell into step with him.

“So…” Crowley said. “The rumours were true. I heard you were in Florence.” He sniffed, breathing in the scent of the package in Aziraphale’s hands. “Swung by to pop in the _pasticceria_?”

“You know perfectly well I can’t tell you why I’m here,” said Aziraphale. “That information isn’t for the likes of you.”

“Yep. I know. Doesn’t stop me asking, though. How are you?”

“Ugh. Busy. Up to my neck in it.”

“Bad?”

“Don’t ask,” said Aziraphale, rolling his eyes. “They’re all reinterpreting the word of God for themselves and setting fire to each other over it. And they were _just_ getting over the Crusades, too – all that terrible violence over whose God was the right God – and now it’s all erupting over whether the Bible should be in German or English or Latin or whatever.”

“Oh, I know,” said Crowley. “It’s almost like religion is divisive or something.”

“Stop it. Can’t you let me be glad to see you for five minutes before you start needling me?”

“I’m sorry,” said Crowley, both pleased and amused. “Can I get that in writing? _You_ were glad to see me?”

Aziraphale turned peevish. “Well, you’ve got the tense right,” he said. “Were. My delight is rapidly diminishing now that I remember what you’re actually like.”

“You missed me. You _like_ me. Just a little bit.”

“Stop it.”

“You do,” said Crowley, and then decided to leave it alone. Where Aziraphale was concerned, he had learned to take the small victories wherever he could find them.

Aziraphale paused to listen to a holy man going at it in the piazza. The priest wore an austere black robe that spoke of hessian underwear beneath, and he was raving good and hard about the evils of the modern world. “…I speak of the decadence of their art, of a David who looks more like a sultan’s catamite than the slayer of Goliath. Lust fairly drips from their brushes, and it’s with _this_ that the Medici think they can purge their sins? Usury, I say. Usury, harlotries, sodomitical artists…”

Crowley tried not to preen. _Lust fairly drips from their brushes._ It was so nice to have one’s work recognised.

“Oh dear,” said Aziraphale. “How long do you think he’s going to last?”

“I’ll be amazed if he makes it to next Thursday,” said Crowley. “Criticising the Medici can take years off your life.”

“True. He’s got guts, I’ll give him that. And good intentions. He just needs a little more…focus.”

“Focus?”

“Yes. He’s attacking everything. He was going on about the printing press earlier.”

“The what now?” said Crowley.

“The printing press,” said Aziraphale, like he was talking to an idiot. “Honestly, Crowley – it’s all anybody’s talking about. Have you been keeping pace with _any_ of the modern technology, or have you just been lounging around Italy drinking and persuading people to sign up for an eternity of red hot spikes up their bottoms?”

“The latter,” said Crowley. “You know me and Italian wine.”

“You’re awful.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of my job. So what’s the deal with the printing press, then?”

“It’s very exciting.” Aziraphale drew in with a confidential air, and took Crowley’s arm, almost startling Crowley clean out of his own skin. As far as long memory served correctly, Aziraphale had never done that before. At least, not while he was sober. “I caught a glimpse of one of the originals back in Germany. You can move the letters all over the place, everywhere you want them to go. And then – and this is the really remarkable part – you can make _infinite copies_ of the same page. No more sitting around in freezing cold monastery libraries, copying everything by hand and getting chilblains and writers cramp. Perfect copies.”

“Sounds good,” said Crowley, who was still struggling to get to grips with this new, touchy feely angel. He was very close. Had he always smelled that nice? “What did your man in the piazza have to say about it?”

“Oh, he said it would inevitably be used to pervert the word of God,” said Aziraphale. “But you can always rely upon people like that to say those sorts of things.”

“True,” said Crowley, and gently bumped his upper arm against the angel’s. “So. How long are you in Florence for?”

“A while. A few weeks, maybe.” 

They stopped at the end of the street, and Aziraphale slipped his arm out from Crowley’s. For an awkward moment they stood there, face to face, angel and demon, taking stock of one another after the gap of a century or so. Aziraphale looked good, lit up from learning something new and having something positive to say about the future. Being Aziraphale, he was probably already thinking about the wonderful possibilities offered by this new technology – more literacy, less ignorance, a chance for reason and empathy to prevail as more people were exposed, via the written word, to the experiences and emotions of others. Crowley, on the other hand, was already thinking ahead to how this new technology would be employed to aid masturbation, which was usually the first thing humans did whenever they figured out anything new.

“Well,” he said, wondering if their relationship had reached the point where hugs might be deemed appropriate. “Maybe I’ll see you around, then.”

“Yes, maybe. We’ll have to go out for a drink, perhaps.”

“Definitely,” said Crowley. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a hug, but a drink would do. It had been far too long since they’d had the opportunity to get properly plastered. One of the main features of the fourteenth fucking century had been plague, and plague had kept Aziraphale extremely busy. Most of Crowley’s glimpses of him had been of him flitting between stricken households with his eyebrows drawn down to their most anxious angle, and of him trailing the faint scent of healing miracles behind him, the smell almost lost against the roiling background reeks of sickness and death. Crowley – despite a lot of constant soul searching about whether he should have been feeling this way in the first place – had missed him. That was the trouble with Aziraphale: he made things all kinds of complicated in the feelings department, and Crowley was never sure whether it was because the angel was just that charming or because he was incredibly bad at being a demon.

Still, Aziraphale had left him with something to think about regarding this printing press business, and a few cogs were already stirring and rumbling into motion between Crowley’s ears. That thing about perfect copies and infinite reproductions had tickled his recent fancy for mass corruptions, and he slunk off to drink heavily, think heavily and figure out how he could get his hands on one of these press thingies.

Around midnight he ran out of wine, so he took his jug out onto the streets of Florence in search of a refill. It was when he was staggering back with his wine jug newly filled that he saw a light from a doorway, and the unmistakable sounds of a party going on inside. Crowley tottered towards it like a drunk moth to an alcoholic flame.

There was an angel in the doorway.

Not his angel, but one of the better angels he’d seen coming out of the artists’ studios of Florence. It was the first thing he saw when he looked through the open door, a painting on a panel leaning against the wall. The angel wore red, white and green, and the drapery had that super realistic look, that amazing interplay of light and shadows that all the best painters were doing lately. And the wings. The wings were downy where they grew from the angel’s back, just like the real thing, like the way Aziraphale’s wings had looked soft enough to touch when they’d stood there together on the garden wall – a demon too soppy to be properly demonic and an angel too keen to err on the side of kindness.

The angel’s face was in profile – high forehead, Greek nose, spiralling curls – and in the light from the lamps and candles it almost looked like flesh and blood. The hands, one upraised, the other holding a tall white lily, were impossibly delicate. Fascinated, Crowley slipped through the doorway, vaguely recalling this place as Verrocchio’s. Verrocchio had been responsible for one of those ‘sodomitical’ Davids that old Hellfireface had been ranting about in the piazza that afternoon. Like most artists in Florence, the master had his _ragazzi_ , a merry go round of apprentices/models who came and went and partied. Tonight they were doing just that.

And then some.

There was a ship in the room, a massive wooden party prop on wheels carefully concealed so that the thing might look as though it had sailed in. The sails were emblazoned with the lilies of Florence and the _palle_ of the Medici. Friezes of wooden, painted waves decorated the disordered studio, and the boys were all over the place – lolling on the forecastle, laughing on couches, passing wine back and forth and playing lutes and flutes and drums. They were all wearing masks.

“Can I help you?” said a voice at his elbow. “Are you lost?”

Crowley turned to see a fair-haired young man in a black domino. “Uh…I brought booze?” he said, holding up the wine jug.

The lips beneath the mask – finely finished, with a lower lip noticeably thicker and fuller than the upper – curved in a smile. “Oh. Well. Then you’re found.” The human reached for Crowley’s glasses. “What are you wearing?”

Crowley had lived his long life in the edges of people’s vision, a dark flicker in the corner of the eye, lurking like an unpleasant thought. If people looked too long at him he had learned tricks to make their eyes slip away – _nothing to see here, perfectly normal_ – and they went on about their days. Until now, nobody had ever simply reached up and snatched the glasses from his eyes, the better to get a look at their construction.

“It’s a…it’s like a mask,” he said, shaken to his deepest foundations. “Like yours…please give those back…it’s really no different than yours.”

“I don’t think so,” said the human, holding the glasses up to the candlelight. “This is _much_ more intricate work than mine. The smoked glass must shield your eyes from the sun…” He turned and looked Crowley directly in the eye, and didn’t look away. “Your eyes,” he said. “They’re different.”

“Yeah, it’s a medical thing,” said Crowley.

“Fascinating,” said the human, trying on the glasses over his mask. “Is this how you see the world?”

“Sometimes. Look, I’m going to need those back.”

The young man shook his head and went on examining the glasses. In the low light his curly hair held the dull, rich gleam of old gold. “Who are you?”

“Nobody. I told you. I got lost. Wandered in here by mistake.”

Finally, the man handed back the glasses, his eyes narrowing in the slits of his mask. “ _You_ didn’t tell me that at all,” he said. “ _I_ was the one who told you that you were lost.”

“Ssso you did,” said Crowley. His tongue caught on the sibilant, the way it sometimes did, another one of those things he’d learned to conceal from humans. But not this one. This one was not only more curious than Eve, but drunk enough to simply demand.

“Show me your tongue,” he said, grabbing Crowley’s sleeve.

“What? No.”

“Show me. It’s different, too. I can tell. You’re not like other people, are you? _Show me_.”

In his eagerness and drunken intensity the human pulled at Crowley’s sleeve. Crowley, not used to being pulled anywhere, was caught off balance, and they stumbled into the shadow of an alcove at the foot of a narrow staircase. The sudden press of another body and the smells of sweat and wine only disorientated him further, and the next thing Crowley knew the young man’s fingers were on his lips. “Show me,” he said again, and Crowley opened his mouth, slid out his tongue for inspection.

It was dark, but darkness didn’t seem to stop this human. When he found he couldn’t see all that well with his eyes he employed his sense of touch instead, his fingers seeking and finding the bifid tip of Crowley’s tongue. Crowley wasn’t supposed to show anyone this. It was part of the unspoken rules. Hell had no problem with him occasionally assuming the appearance of something truly dreadful, and even fewer problems with him assuming the appearance of something much more appealling, but this was something you just didn’t do. You didn’t _tell_ people you were a demon, because – as it turned out – when Hell became real to humans they scurried all the harder in the general direction of Heaven. Crowley didn’t tell, and he certainly didn’t show, at least until now.

The young man’s fingers tasted of wine, oil and paint. He pushed them deeper into Crowley’s mouth, feeling for the root of his tongue as though trying to make tactile sense of the whole. Crowley started to laugh, making his tongue slip and slide out of the human’s grasp. “Shh,” the human said, when Crowley laughed too loud. He reached behind him and twitched a faded curtain across the mouth of the alcove, and then his lips replaced his fingers.

More out of surprise than anything else, Crowley opened his mouth, and was astonished to find how unprepared he was for what happened next. He’d seen this before, obviously. He’d seen it the first time, in the Garden of Eden, when Eve first pressed her lips to Adam’s and then they couldn’t stop doing it for some reason. “ _That?_ ” he’d said to Aziraphale. “That was part of the Knowledge they were supposed to restrain themselves from seeking? That mashing their food holes together is somehow incredibly good fun?”

Aziraphale had been very young back then, and had demurely averted his gaze from the increasingly urgent pile of human flesh writhing on the grass some ten feet away. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he’d said.

“Bloody ridiculous ways, if you ask me,” Crowley had said, and the words came back to haunt him, because it _was_ incredibly good fun, as well as being bloody ridiculous. Obviously he’d tempted to Lust before and it wasn’t the first time he’d had a human’s tongue in his mouth, but when you actually _wanted_ that tongue to be there…well, that turned out to be a game changer. His entire corporation stood up and took notice, some parts standing more significantly than others. _Free will_ , he thought. _Why is this a bad thing, again?_

The human’s tongue slithered against his, and somehow this caused small, strange sparks to dance around inside the most appreciative parts of his brain. His head was already spinning, his spine in an even more liquid state than it usually was, and then he felt it – a hand. Just a warm hand, working its way under his codpiece to find the slit in his breeches, but again – it turned out that wanting it there made all the difference, and as the fingers found him he wondered if he would ever want anything again in the same way he wanted this touch. “Oh God,” he said, for the first time in more centuries than he could remember, and he heard the young man giggle in the back of his throat, felt the lips pressed to his stretch in a knowing smile.

Now the human’s hand squeezed, gently but firmly, tugging at the same time. Rub, tug, squeeze – a rhythm almost as ancient as Crowley was. Of course he knew it, but it had always been a bit of a joke before, the perpetual motion of perverts in parks since humans had first invented parks. But this – this was not a joke. This was serious. Very, very serious, the pleasure so sharp that it shaded towards pain. He felt the stutter of the young man’s breath against his wet lips as a second hand joined the first, cupping his balls with a tenderness that startled the poor things so much that they sneezed.

“Oh fuck,” he whispered, as his body decided to embarrass him in the most delicious way he’d ever experienced. He knew the mechanics, and he’d even done it before, but usually in spite of and never directly as a consequence of the overblown eroticism going on around him: tempting to Lust could get pretty damn cringy. Not like this. This was…nice. The human was giggling again at the mess he’d made, and all Crowley wanted to do in that moment was carry him off somewhere where they could take all their clothes off and (really?) cuddle. 

Something had gone terribly wrong somewhere. He was sure demons weren’t supposed to be consumed with the desire to _cuddle_.

Crowley knelt. This much he knew how to do, because it was another one of those reluctant things that went along with tempting to Lust, but now it made sense. Now he finally understood why someone would want to do this, and why humans did so much of it, because it made sense to want to return the favour, to make the human feel even half as good as the human had made him feel. When your entire job was about making people not only feel bad but _be_ bad, making someone feel uncomplicatedly good was like a holiday. Not just good, but close to blessed. He snaked his tongue around the hot shaft, feeling the strain in the human’s bare hips, listening eagerly as his breathless whispers became more and more frantic. “Oh yes…yes…please, please…oh, you angel…oh _yes_ …”

He was a long way from angel, but he’d never felt closer. He swallowed down the mouthful of salt and heat and smiled at a job well done.

“You need to come back tomorrow,” said the human, who was still breathing hard. He caressed Crowley’s hair.

Crowley rubbed into the hand on his head like a happy cat. “You don’t even know what I am,” he said.

“I know,” said the human. “That’s why you need to come back tomorrow.”

Crowley almost didn’t.

The encounter had shaken him up, put a sheen on his soul somehow, a gloss and glitter he’d previously only felt clinging to it after spending time with Aziraphale. It left him with the suspicion that someone was working against him, because the human had seemed…well…more than human. Which left the possibility that he was some kind of secret agent from Heaven or Hell, sent to test Crowley. Perhaps someone had seen him arm in arm with Aziraphale and spread a rumour that he was going soft. Which he wasn’t. At all. Totally still at the top of his temptation game, thank you very much.

He kept the appointment anyway, because curious humans were very much his business, and this one had been more curious than a clowder of cats turned loose in a fish packing plant. In daylight Verrocchio’s studio had the slightly tawdry look of a room after a party, and the same sour wine smell. The ship had been pushed to the side of the room. Last night it had looked like a candlelit mirage, a thing that had somehow sailed all the way up the Arno and into the festivities, but by daylight Crowley could see the wheels. It seemed to be made of wood and cardboard and he hung around for a moment basking in the uselessness of it. It reminded him of the way the Romans used to flood the amphitheatre to pitch full on mock naval battles for the audience. All that technology, all that wild human ingenuity, employed solely for the purposes of _fun_. 

Crowley spotted the young man from last night. The first thing that flashed into his head was the word _NO_ in urgent capitals, and he found himself immediately afraid to see the human in daylight. What if he, too, had been an illusion, something that looked less impressive in daylight?

But he didn’t. He smelled of oil, paint, and egg white, and when the light struck his large eyes Crowley saw that they were grey-blue, the colour of a spring storm in Tuscany. His eyelashes were blond, pale and pretty as a girl’s. While the bridge of his nose already showed the eagle shape it would grow into when he was old, in the morning light Crowley could see the recent ghosts of childhood freckles. He was young even by human standards. By the standards of a subtle and ancient beast like Crowley he was laughably so, a drop in an ocean, a single star in an infinite sky. But still he shone.

“I meant to ask you last night,” said Crowley. “What’s with the ship?”

“A prop,” said the human. “I design effects for parties and stage productions, among other things.”

“Other things?” Crowley inclined his head towards the front door, where the angel still knelt, head bent and wings folded. “Did you paint that?”

“I’m _still_ painting it. It’s not finished.” The young man sighed. “It’s a nuisance – I can’t get her hands right. The Virgin, that is. Hands say so much.” He turned back to the Annunciation and shook his head, absorbed in a million flaws that only he could see. “Some painters only focus on the face, but there’s a whole other world of meaning in the attitudes of the body. She’s _flat_. That’s the trouble. She looks like a painted image, not flesh and blood and bone. Flesh and blood and bone is the whole _point_ , although perhaps it might be blasphemy to say so.”

“I don’t see how,” said Crowley. “Sounds like a reasonable definition of incarnation to me.”

“It is, but try telling that to the church. Sometimes I think they want to divorce us all from our bodies completely. Forget that Jesus ate, slept, farted, pissed, and suffered along with the rest of us. Became nothing more than meat, when it comes right down to it.”

“That’s kind of a disgusting way to put it.”

“Most meat is,” said the human. “When you think about it.” He smiled and his eyes were full of the same inviting warmth that had rattled Crowley so thoroughly last night. “Anyway…” he said, and – grabbing a handful of Crowley’s doublet – yanked him discreetly into the alcove next to the stairs.

The tongue was back, and the hands, and the urgent friction that had made last night such a revelation. Humans – they’d make fun out of anything, even a confused demon who had never found this kind of thing fun before. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” said the young man, confiscating Crowley’s glasses again. “Your eyes really are yellow, aren’t they? I thought I was dreaming. What makes them that colour? Is it a disease?”

“Something like that,” said Crowley, already somewhat dizzy. The only person whose company he was really used to was Aziraphale’s, and Aziraphale didn’t like questions. He always ended up nervously wondering if he ought to be asking them in the first place. Humans varied. Some of them spent their lives like angels – trying not to ask questions and being all the worse for it – while others asked all the wrong questions. Then there were others who asked _all_ the questions, like this one man barrage of whys and wherefores. Crowley hadn’t encountered a human being quite like this since Eve wiped the juice from her chin, looked up at the sky and immediately needed to know why it was blue.

“Who are you?” he said, feeling like he should be allowed to ask some questions, too.

“My name is Leonardo,” said the human, and went in for another kiss.

“Wait,” said Crowley. “Just Leonardo?”

“I don’t really have a last name,” said Leonardo. “Not officially, anyway. What about you?”

“Crowley.”

“Crowley,” said Leonardo. He pronounced it _Chrolli._ “Is that English?”

“It could be,” said Crowley, who had never really thought about it before. “I suppose.”

“So, Messer Crowley – I think we know each other better than that already. What’s your first name?”

“Yeah, I don’t really have one.”

Leonardo frowned. “How do you not have a first name? Even bastard sons from Vinci have first names.”

“I don’t know,” said Crowley. “I just…” He shrugged. “I just never got round to it.”

“Wait, you weren’t even baptised?”

Crowley tried to remember. Once he’d had a different name, something airy and celestial like Aziraphale’s. At some point that name had been bestowed on him in something like a baptism but it was irrelevant now, because it was forgotten and gone. It had been stripped from him – along with his halo and his white feathers – during what was frankly an extremely unfair workplace tribunal, after which he’d had to acquire other attributes. Like flame retardance, and self-determination. All he knew was that the name he wore now had simply been his choice, and hadn’t required any kind of baptism. Some of the younger demons went in for that kind of thing, with the usual blasphemous inversions and unsavoury fluids subbing for holy water, but Crowley wasn’t into it. It was a short step from satanic baptisms to full on black masses, and Crowley couldn’t be doing with that. It always ended in goat’s blood, embarrassment, and laundry. Lots and lots of laundry.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Leonardo looked shocked. “Then you really are a lost soul,” he said. “Even more than me.”

“It’s not so bad,” said Crowley. “The last time I got lost I found you, so that couldn’t have been all bad, could it?”

That got him a laugh, and more kisses, which was nice. Usually if he’d said that kind of thing to Aziraphale he’d get a close-mouthed, shifty eyed look while the angel tried to figure out if he should be enjoying a demon’s company. Aziraphale, like most angels, thought entirely too much in terms of _shoulds_.

“I know,” said Leonardo, his fingers in Crowley’s hair. “I’ll call you Antonio.”

“Um…why?”

“Because.” Another kiss. “Antonio is the saint of lost things.”

Antonio. Anthony. Anthony Crowley. Huh. That actually sounded pretty slick. Maybe needed a little something more, but it sounded like a name he could walk around with and not attract too much attention. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. Works for me.”

Leonardo couldn’t seem to stop kissing him, and Crowley was in no position to object. His body felt like he’d bitten the same apple he’d once pushed on Eve, his new sexual curiosity too massive to be denied. Things were starting to get interesting again, but then someone loudly knocked something over somewhere in the studio and they both stiffened and froze. There was a brief commotion with a man – presumably Master Verrocchio – telling someone that he had feet where he should have had hands, and Leonardo trembled with suppressed laughter, laughter that threatened to infect Crowley and give them both away.

“Listen,” said Leonardo, when the stifled giggles had subsided. “I know a place where we can go. You have to follow me at a distance, though. It’s a place with a very bad reputation.”

“No problem,” said Crowley. “I’m no stranger to bad reputations.” 

Leonardo checked that the coast was clear and together they sneaked out of the alcove and out of the door. “Wait,” Leonardo said, and went on ahead. He wasn’t hard to pick out from a crowd because he was dressed in a long, flowy yellow tunic that almost reached his knees. The current fashions were short, and as Leonardo slipped through the narrow streets the doublets of the boys around them seemed to get even shorter, cut high to expose rounded buttocks in tight hose. They wore large, gaudy codpieces and some had even darkened their eyelashes with soot and dabbed their cheeks with pink powder. Some of them turned towards Crowley like flowers towards the sun, but he was oblivious, focused on the boy in yellow. Leonardo may have been dressed differently, but he swung his hips just like the others when he marched up the stairs.

At some point money changed hands, but Crowley barely registered the chink of the coins. This was a clandestine thing for humans because for some reason – even in Florence – they considered it a bad thing if two people with matching genitalia happened to bump them together for fun, and that set Crowley off worrying if he was about to do something he’d have difficulty explaining to a superior if caught. You were supposed to do this kind of thing in order to make people worse, not to make them better, and probably not for pleasure, but oh well. He’d worry about the likes of Hastur when they showed up, he thought, as the door closed behind them and he was alone with Leonardo.

It was a small room. There was a bed with a sagging middle, and the open window looked out over the higgledy-piggledy roofs to the Duomo. Leonardo closed the shutters and they creaked. There were holes in the slats and the sunlight winked through like a rude suggestion, flirting with the gold lights of his dirty blond hair. “All right?” he said, and pulled his yellow tunic off over his head. Before Crowley had time to answer the undershirt was on the floor, along with the hose and everything else, and he couldn’t stop staring. In his time he’d gazed into the birth fires of alien suns, the faces of archangels, and even into the eyes of God, but somehow none of these things shone as bright as this pale wisp of flesh and bone and sinew. Beautiful. Just beautiful, with lightly muscled limbs, freckles on his shoulders, and with his cock already rising from a soft tangle of light brown hair. When he stepped closer Crowley trembled, filled with a sudden fear that he was about to start crying.

“Have you done this before?” Leonardo said.

“Yeah. Of course. Do it all the time.”

Their lips met once more. The noises of the crowded city seemed to fade away as Crowley’s attention narrowed in on the soft, wet sound that Leonardo’s tongue made as it moved against his own. His slow, old demon heart skittered and thrummed like a human heart, so that he could feel his pulse beating against the thin skin behind his balls. Leonardo’s hands moved to claim him again, but for some reason Crowley couldn’t bring himself to touch. Not yet. He still had that fear that if he touched him he would come unravelled immediately, and in some incredibly embarrassing way.

In the end it was Leonardo who took Crowley’s hand and placed it deliberately on his bare, white narrow hip. That was all his took. One touch, and Crowley was instantly stupid with the desire to handle every last inch of skin, and to never, ever stop touching him. He leaned in hard and fast, shoving Leonardo up against the wall, hands all over him, roaming everywhere and trying to take him all in at once.

“No,” Leonardo managed to gasp, between frantic kisses. “On the _bed_. And you have to take your clothes off.”

With a huge effort of will, Crowley stopped what he was doing. If hands felt this good then what was skin against skin going to feel like? “Right,” he said. “Yeah. I knew that.”

Leonardo swayed against him and turned him around, his back to the bed now. “Are you sure you’ve done this before?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Crowley.

Leonardo laughed. “Liar,” he said, and pushed Crowley onto the bed.

* * *

There was cuddling.

Afterwards there was cuddling, and Crowley couldn’t get enough of it. Not since Eve – before she knew any better that snakes were a danger – had a human hand touched him with such fearless curiosity. Leonardo had seen it all – yellow eyes, scaly toes, weird tongue – and he didn’t care. Neither did he care that Crowley didn’t really know what he was doing, because once he was between the sheets he turned gratifyingly bossy – “That’s it…relax. Put your leg there. Hips up. There…how does that feel?”

It felt like madness, in the best possible way. When he looked back at those few weeks in Florence Crowley was sure that he’d somehow become unhinged, or more so than usual. He drifted through his days thinking only of the last time, obsessing over the things they’d said and done together, floating into reveries whenever he remembered the silk of Leonardo’s inner thigh, the way the rose pink of his nipples was a lighter version of the deep flush at the tip of his erection, and of the way he looked afterwards, blushed and somehow blurred, like all the shakes and shudders of their urgent wrigglings had somehow smudged the lines of his very existence. He thought of all these things and more, and every time when he thought of them he ached for the next time.

When they were together, in the little room that Crowley had permanently reserved for their meetings, Crowley couldn’t see anything beyond the now, even though he knew this time would always end, just as Leonardo would one day end. Later he fantasised about freezing time forever, and they’d roam around in a static world of colourful statues, but he knew that would never satisfy Leonardo, who was fascinated by motion, whether it was the friction they generated in the bedroom or the beat of a bird’s wings. Once Crowley slowed time at the moment of climax and afterwards Leonardo looked more blurred and rosy than usual, not to mention confused.

“Whatever you just did to me, I don’t think you should do it again,” he said. “I felt like I was about to lose my mind, and I don’t think I’d be much use to anyone without a mind.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Crowley, kissing the hard, lovely rise of a hip bone. “I lost my mind ages ago. I’ve been doing fine without it.”

Leonardo looked down at him. His fingers were twined in Crowley’s hair and he was once again wearing that anxious expression that had been creeping into their bedroom bit by bit lately. Crowley still hadn’t figured out exactly what that expression meant, but he had a feeling it had something to do with Leonardo being a lot more intelligent than the average human.

Eager to put him at ease, Crowley kissed the other hip bone in its turn, kissed the fluff of sweaty pubic hair at the root of Leonardo’s wilting cock and kissed his way all the way up until the tips of their noses touched. Leonardo wrapped his legs around Crowley, but his slight frown remained. “When you say ages ago…” he said. “You mean it, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

Leonardo sighed and was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again he sounded a lot like he was talking more to himself than to Crowley. “I’m not going to ask you what you are,” he said. “Perhaps there’s such a thing as asking too many questions.”

“Really?” said Crowley, frightened that he might have broken him with the orgasm trick. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

Leonardo shook his head against the pillow, his fingers twined in Crowley’s hair. “Strange things happen when you’re around,” he said. “Time stretches and contracts. The quality of the wine in the cup improves whenever you’re in a room. Taken together these are symptoms of a very commonplace commotion, but you still have the eyes of a serpent.” His own eyes were almost black now, the pupils so wide that the blue was like a ring around the moon. He wrapped a curl of Crowley’s hair around his finger as he gazed, and Crowley stared back and tried to work out what was going on in that extraordinary human head. “You’re something,” Leonardo said, his other hand reaching for Crowley’s, palm to palm. “And I don’t know what. Sooner or later I expect I’ll get curious and ruin everything, but right now I like your curls. I like your yellow eyes, and your long fingers.” He pulled the hand up to his face and kissed the fingers threaded between his own. “Your hands are so beautiful. You must let me draw them one day.”

Crowley hesitated. He wasn’t even sure why, but then a few days later he woke up and found Leonardo sitting on the end of the bed, sketching. “What are you doing?” he said, and Leonardo showed him.

If he hadn’t already known that Leonardo was a genius at life drawing, Crowley would have suspected him of drawing a stranger. The red chalk image on the page didn’t look like himself. Well, it did, and it didn’t. It had the same red hair and lanky build, but he felt sure his hair had never spilled all over the pillow in such perfect curls, and his legs, while long, weren’t nearly that graceful. And as for… _that_ , no. For all it had provided him with an insane amount of fun lately, there was no getting away that it was a strange looking thing, and he’d never seen it from that angle before.

His first thought was _imagine if anybody else saw this_ , and his mouth immediately went dry. Oh, there would be literally hell to pay if any other demon ever saw this. At best he’d never live it down. At worst he’d be dragged before the Lords of Hell and asked to explain himself, although for what exactly he wasn’t sure. All he really had to go on was a vague sense that his current pink, fluffy feelings constituted a failure to demon properly. He was supposed to be giving people boils, not pleasure.

“I don’t think you should show this to anyone else,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to, silly. This is for me.”

Crowley squinted at the drawing. “Does it really look like that when I’m asleep?” he said, his lips against Leonardo’s bare shoulder.

Leonardo laughs. “Sometimes. You looked like you were having a pleasant dream. I wanted to capture the moment, although you still need to pose for me properly sometime.”

“Do I have to? I’m not very good at sitting still.”

They met every day, and at night, too. Crowley would follow him at a distance as they’d done the first time, and Leonardo would lead the way through the market, an eccentric figure in his bright, knee-length tunics. He would always cross the street to avoid butchers’ shops, and Crowley later learned that he ate no meat, which was why it was such a surprise one day when he stopped one day at a stall and bought live birds. Not chickens, but small birds, the kind of sparrow type things that the French liked to drown in brandy, a monstrous delicacy that even Aziraphale had once balked at.

It was only then that Crowley realised he hadn’t even been looking for Aziraphale for weeks. Usually he’d be roaming the piazza watching the bakers’ stalls in much the same way as lions watch a watering hole, but then it hit him. Not only had Aziraphale disappeared, but Crowley hadn’t even noticed he was missing.

“Huh,” said Crowley, not sure what this meant. His old paranoia – that Leonardo was somehow a secret agent sent from Upstairs – bobbed up for a second before being shoved back underwater and held there by his libido until the bubbles stopped rising to the surface. Leonardo and his birds had also disappeared, and Crowley was intrigued.

He made his way to the room where they met, and found Leonardo sitting on the windowsill speaking softly to the birds in the wooden cage. He wore pink today, a deep rose shade so similar to the colour of his most interesting parts that it felt like an incitement. “Shh,” he said, as Crowley closed the door. He draped the back of the cage with a cloth, reached around to the front and opened the door of the cage. He stepped back and waited. Nothing happened, but the birds began to twitter and chirp. “Goldfinches,” said Leonardo, in a whisper. “Three nightingales, and a linnet.”

“Great,” said Crowley, speaking softly. “What are you doing with them?”

“Letting them out.”

“Are you sure? Aren’t they cage birds? Do they even know how to be wild?”

“They’re wild,” said Leonardo, moving away from the window. He started to undress. “I can tell. I’ve watched them. The wild ones huddle in the middle of the cage, like they’re hoping the bars will somehow vanish if they can’t see them or touch them. The poor things are mad with fright right now, so I’m trying to calm them down by letting them see the sky unobstructed.” He tossed the last of his clothes onto the floor and walked naked into Crowley’s arms. “You’re going to have to fuck me quietly today. I don’t want to scare the birds.”

While they tangled and tumbled on the bed the birds began to overcome their fear and venture out of the cage. In his attempts to stifle his moans Leonardo bit his lip, his knuckles, and one time the bony part of Crowley’s shoulder, hard enough to leave marks. His silence was somehow even more thrilling than the usual chorus of incredible noises he made whenever they did this, and by the time they glimpsed the peak it had turned into a sexy battle of wills, with Leonardo fighting to keep his mouth shut while Crowley tried to break him, fucking him so hard that the room was filled with the squeak of the bedframe and the slap of flesh on flesh.

“Come on – I know you want to,” Crowley whispered, leaning forward to taunt him as he felt Leonardo tense and quiver in a way that he was beginning to learn meant he was doing a good job. Leonardo bit his lip almost hard enough to draw blood, the veins in his neck standing out, but he was too far gone. The breath he’d been fighting to hold exploded from his mouth in a long, loud cry, so obscene sounding that he – somehow, at the same time – burst into embarrassed laughter. He finished like that, laughing, moaning and coming all at once, his hand over his mouth and his eyes casting guilty glances at the bird cage, where one of the last tenants was fluttering audibly behind the cloth. Crowley laughed with him and poured himself into him, shuddering and holding him there for a long time afterwards.

“God,” said Leonardo, gasping, his feet on Crowley’s sagging shoulders. “Oh my God.” A bird broke loose and streaked off into the sunny afternoon sky.

They untangled and rearranged themselves, curled nose to nose on the bed, fingers tracing patterns in drying sweat. For an original sin this didn’t feel very sinful. If anything it felt confusingly _good_ – not just in the pleasurable sense, but good in the way that Aziraphale was good, fashioned by Heaven and blessed by God. Good with a capital g, the kind of Good that Crowley was – surely by his very nature – incapable of doing. And yet he did it anyway. He did it a lot, and often, and every time he felt a little more gilded, as though his broken and confiscated halo had learned to illuminate him all over again. And that was definitely impossible. There was no such thing as falling upwards.

Leonardo sighed. He was looking at Crowley in that way again, the one that said he couldn’t decide if he wanted Crowley to carry on being a mystery to him. Inevitable, really. Leonardo didn’t do well with mysteries. Like Crowley he was incapable of leaving them alone, no matter how much of a mess they made when you tried to unravel them.

“What?” said Crowley, his fingers tiptoeing over Leonardo’s ribs, making him shiver. He was very ticklish. “What are you thinking?”

“Oh, nothing. And everything.” Leonardo stretched and sighed again. “I was in the Duomo this morning.”

“Repenting your sins?”

“No. Regretting the ones I haven’t committed yet. Do you know the statue of John the Evangelist? Donatello was twenty-five when he finished that thing. _Twenty-five._ I’m nearly there and all the Medici thinks I’m good for is building props for his parties.”

“They’re good props,” said Crowley.

“They’re ephemera,” said Leonardo. “Gone in the blink of an eye, and a drunkard’s eye at that.” He flopped on his back and exhaled. “I mean, I suppose I could apply again to his mother for patronage, but she already has more clients than she has fingers and toes, and _you_ try catching Lucrezia Tornabuoni di Medici at a loose end. She’s never not busy with her writing.” He gave Crowley a long, sad look. “I’m starting to think I might have to leave Florence if I’m to make anything of myself. Look at me – I’m far too be old to be rattling around Verrocchio’s place like a loose tooth. I’m an overgrown apprentice and I need to get out, start a studio of my own.”

Crowley propped himself up on one elbow. “Where will you go?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Milan, Rome. Probably not Rome, now that I think about it. The client to patron ratio is probably even worse there than it is here in Florence.” He leaned in and kissed Crowley with a strange and wonderful tenderness. “And thank you, by the way.”

“What for?”

“For not patting me on the head and saying ‘Oh, you’re young. You have time,’ every time I complain I’m restless. Everyone else I’ve talked to about it seems to be singing that same dreary song.”

Crowley didn’t say anything. Instead he wound himself around Leonardo, head on his chest, and lay there listening to the steady thump of Leonardo’s heart. It was like a bass, a rhythm underlying the music of the city outside their window – the clatter of cart wheels, the plaintive brays of donkeys, the catcalls of the boys looking for customers. Somewhere a woman was singing a loud and bawdy song about cucumbers, and like a pious retort came the sound of a church bell, ringing the hour. Four o’clock. They had been up here since before two.

A crow craaaked loudly near the window and Leonardo turned his head at the sound.

“Your birds have stopped singing,” said Crowley.

“They’re not mine,” said Leonardo, sitting up and getting off the bed. “And I expect they’ve all flown away.” He went shameless and stark naked to the window, and peeked into the front of the cage. “Oh no.”

“What?” Crowley joined him. Leonardo reached into the cage and brought out a small, limp brown bird. It was dead.

“Poor thing,” said Leonardo. “He must have died of fright.”

“Give him here,” said Crowley, and took the bird from him. It felt like it was made of nothing more than air and cold feathers. Crowley stroked the motionless breast with a fingertip, now absolutely sure that he shouldn’t be doing this. Couldn’t be doing this, because this was Good, no question about it, but here he was, doing it anyway. “Think he’s just swooned,” he said, letting life slip through his fingers and into the body of the tiny creature. “Do birds swoon? I don’t know…this one has, anyway.” The tiny heart fluttered and blipped as strength returned to the motionless wings. “There he is…he’s fine.”

The limp body was once again muscle and bone, filled out by the vital force of life. Crowley let it go and the bird flew up and landed on the gutter of the rooftop opposite the window. It began to sing, a series of liquid trills that sounded delightful but were in reality probably just Bird for ‘what the fuck just happened?’

Crowley wasn’t entirely sure either, and by the looks of things neither was Leonardo. He’d gone pale, and his eyes were far too big.

“What?” said Crowley. “Have you never seen a bird faint before? They do it all the time.”

Leonardo shook his head. When he reached for Crowley the hands that cupped Crowley’s face were trembling. “If I leave Florence will you come with me?” he said, all in a rush, and then quickly stopped Crowley’s mouth with a kiss. “No, don’t answer that now. Or tomorrow. Forget I asked, actually. Just come to me tonight.”

* * *

The sun was setting when Crowley headed out that evening. The market stalls were packing away and the bakers had long gone. In their place stood a forlorn angel, pining for pastries.

“Crowley!” he said, lighting up when he saw him. “Where have you been?”

“Me? Where have you been? I haven’t seen you haunting the bakeries for weeks.”

“Oh, here and there,” said Aziraphale. He looked tanned and glowy and Good, and Crowley suddenly missed him all the more, even though he was right there. Most significantly, he looked like someone who might understand what Crowley had been up to lately. He was, after all, made of love. “Busy busy. You know how it goes.”

“I do,” said Crowley, falling into step with him as they headed out across the emptying piazza. “Actually I’ve been wiling my head off while you were elsewhere. You’ve got a lot of thwarting to catch up with.”

“Oh dear. I should probably get on with that.” Aziraphale delicately cleared his throat. “Drink first, perhaps?”

For all he already had plans, Crowley wanted to say yes, and not just because it made him smile the way Aziraphale still sometimes slipped pronounced the v’s in words like _beviamo_ with an old Roman w sound. He’d spent several weeks trying to figure out his own messy emotions, and while he knew he was in no danger of talking about his feelings (at least not without several buckets of the local vino involved) he was still badly in need of someone else to talk to. “Yeah,” he said. “You know what, why not?”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to put you out.”

“No, not all. Anywhere in mind?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said Aziraphale. “I’ve just found the most interesting little tavern. Serves the most divine red wine from a town a few miles south – Radda in Chianti. Have you heard of it?”

Crowley hadn’t, but looked forward to making its acquaintance. They went round the corner to the tavern and while Aziraphale found a table to his liking Crowley paid a boy a few coins to take a note round to Leonardo da Vinci. “He’ll probably be at Verrocchio’s place,” he said. “Give him this and tell him I’ll be a bit late. Couple of hours, that’s all.”

He found Aziraphale sitting at a corner table, two cups at a bottle in front of him. Once again Crowley felt the strange, mad rush of missing him and he had a desperate desire to drink until he started talking and couldn’t stop.

_Help me. I might be in love, and I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be able to feel love. Is there a little piece of angel left in me? When all the rest of the light burned away from me, did they miss a bit? It’d be just like me to fuck up the falling process. I knew I wasn’t right for ages. I don’t enjoy unalloyed evil nearly as much as I should, and I know I should be a lot more into torture than I am. And maggots. All the other demons are really into maggots and honestly? Not really feeling it. Oh, and I resurrected a bird today. Brown one. Think it was a nightingale, but you know me and birds. Anyway, I made it stop being dead to make someone happy, and yeah – is this how love ruins evil? I don’t know. You start farting about with good old fashioned lust, but then you get all mixed up in the head and you’re like ‘oh, I need a friend to talk to,’ and then there you are and whoops, I’ve gone and spread another kind of love all over the place. Next thing you know you’re off your maggots and you’re losing your edge. Going soft._

In that instant Crowley thought all of these things and more. He said precisely none of them and instead took a seat at the table and said, “Anyway, how was your day?” 

“You know I can’t tell you that,” said Aziraphale, offering him a cup.

“Shut up. You always do. Who else can you tell?”

Aziraphale – just like he often did when Crowley was right – opened his mouth and closed it again. “If you must know, I’ve been up in Ferrara,” he said. “Inspiring a poet.”

“Sounds…amusing.”

“Muses are pagan,” said Aziraphale. “ _I_ am an angel of Inspiration, thank you.”

Crowley sipped. Despite the heat the wine held the agreeable chill of an old cellar. It was a peasant wine, dark as a Homeric sea, exuberantly fruity, and with a sharp tang of black pepper. Trust Aziraphale to know his palate better than he did himself.

Aziraphale watched him. “What do you think?”

“Perfect,” said Crowley. “You know me and Italian wine.”

“It is rather good, isn’t it? It’s not just me.”

“Nope. Not just you.” Crowley tipped his cup in a lazy salute. “So who’s the poet? The next Dante Aligheri?”

Aziraphale scrunched his nose. “Probably not,” he said. “He’s young, and exceedingly gloomy.”

“And Dante wasn’t?”

“Dante had a sense of humour,” said Aziraphale. “Even if it _was_ somewhat dark. This one? Not so much. He writes a lot about blood, and leeches, and the ruin of the world. I’m trying to nudge him in other directions.”

“Other directions?”

“Yes. Steer him towards improving the world rather than wallowing in all his negative feelings about it.”

Crowley sucked his front teeth and frowned. “Yeah. Is this going to be like the time you thought you could improve Nero with music lessons?”

Aziraphale opened and closed his mouth again. Twice. “He did a lot for the arts, actually,” he said.

“Mm. Didn’t quite balance out the rest though, did it?”

Crowley left it alone after that. If you wanted to stay on the angel’s good side – not that he had any other side, of course – it was best not to remind him of own goals. They sat and drank and rambled and gossiped, and drank considerably more, until by the time they rambled and gossiped their way back to the subject of the printing press they were well and truly pickled.

“You know, you always manage to surprise me, angel,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale tried very hard not to look pleased with himself. “How so?”

“I thought you’d be dead against the printing press. The potential for corrupting the Word of God and all that.”

“You can’t corrupt what is essentially…” Aziraphale swallowed a discreet burp. “…incorruptible.”

“Can though,” said Crowley, filling his cup. Apparently these days you could uncorrupt the damned, if you happened to be Leonardo da Vinci. If a human could make a demon raise the dead just to see him smile then everything was on the table. Nothing was impossible anymore. “If what you’re saying about this amazing new invention is true then you can take the Bible, right…?”

“Right.”

“…and insert and delete whatever the hell you want.”

“No,” said Aziraphale. “You can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t.” Aziraphale attempted to fix Crowley with a righteous glare. It didn’t work. Bottle number three had put paid to that. “Look,” he said, wrangling another burp. “The thing about this whole transhlation business is that people will come to know the Word of God. Not just the monks. Not just the clergy. All the people. No more _dominus vobiscum et cum spiritu tuo_ – now the Lord really _is_ with you. In your own language.”

“And?” said Crowley.

“This is my point, you see. The more people that know the Word of God, the better. It protects it from being perverted, because now everyone will know how it’s _supposed_ to go.”

“Bollocks,” said Crowley. “People hear what they want to hear. Always have done, always will do. Doesn’t matter how many people know the words to the song. There’s always that person who adds their own lyrics and that version becomes so well known that people forget all about the original version. Like, you could go in there, right?”

“Go in where?” said Aziraphale.

“The _workshop_. Or wherever they keep it. The printing press.”

“Oh. Right. Yes. With you.”

“Okay. So you go into the workshop and you get all the little letters, right?”

“The moveable type,” said Aziraphale. “Yes. Extraordinary innovation.”

“Yeah, that’s humans for you,” said Crowley. “Anyway, you get the letters, and you say you can make them say _anything_ , right?”

“Yes.”

“All righty then. So you make them say ‘The serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God hath made, but it wasn’t his fault because he’d just hung around with the wrong crowd once upon a time. And some might say it was a disproportionate response.’” Crowley sat back in his chair, sure that on some alcoholic level he had made an enormously important theological point. “What would happen if you did that then?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Aziraphale, who could be annoyingly literal when he was drunk.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Crowley. “Because you’re still an angel, if you are a bit crap at it.”

“A bit crap?”

“No, lissten…” Crowley continued, no longer entirely sure what he was even talking about. “You could put that in there and maybe even another line that says ‘Please tip your friendly neighbourhood serpent,’—”

“—what even goes through your head sometimes, Crowley?—”

“—and, y’know, you could do that. And someone might be like ‘Yeah, where did that bit come from? That was never there before.’ Actually maybe a lot of people would be like that, but you only need a handful of people who are really dedicated to saying, ‘Yes, it it was definitely there all along’ before some of the people who insisted it _wasn’t_ there start questioning whether it was there in the first place. Sure, you might have some strong minded holdouts who say otherwise…”

Aziraphale frowned deeply into the bottom of his drink and peered up over the rim, one eye narrowed. “This sounds an awful lot how you end up with a schism,” he said. “Or a holy war of some sort.”

“Exactly,” said Crowley, who hadn’t been rambling towards that point at all, but now that Aziraphale mentioned it it did seem like the kind of point he – as a demon – ought to be making.

“You’re right,” said Aziraphale. “I _am_ an angel. And I might not be that good at my job, but that’s okay. You, on the other hand…you’re a demon. And you’re good at it. Frighteningly good.”

Crowley felt his face turn hot. He had a horrible feeling he was blushing. Still, it was good to know. He’d been worried lately. “Aw…thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment, Crowley. Anyway, even if you were to go tampering with the word of God and causing yet _another_ holy war, who’s to say it isn’t—”

“—don’t—”

“—it _could_ be—”

“—no no no no.” Crowley put down his drink with a thump and put both hands over his ears. “Don’t start this when I’m drunk. You know I can’t handle this when I’m drunk.” He started humming loudly to drown out Aziraphale’s voice, but it was no use. He could still see the angel’s lips moving, forming the eternally annoying word. _Ineffable_.

“Ineffable bollocks,” said Crowley, giving up and lowering his hands. “That’s not even an explanation. It’s a cop out. It’s lazy, and it doesn’t even work, because have you met humans? They’re not cogs in a machine. They’re far too chaotic for that, for a start. And far too squishy.”

“Squishy?” said Aziraphale.

“Yes. Uncoglike. When did you ever hear of a squishy cog? They’re very much a flesh situation, with all the chaos that goes along with that. I mean, do you know what they get up to? With their hands and their tongues and their you know whats? It’s enough to make your toes curl.”

Aziraphale narrowed his eyes. “Right,” he said. “They’ve been doing that for quite a while now. Crowley, are we going to have to have the conversation about where the unicorns went again? Because I really thought we’d covered that.”

Crowley had only a moment to cringe in horror at the idea of having another one of those birds and bees talks with Aziraphale, because the next thing he knew Aziraphale was gasping through a faceful of red wine.

It was Leonardo. Crowley had lost track of time and clearly Leonardo had had enough. He stood seething in front of their table, oblivious to the fact that he’d just flung a drink all over an angel. “So that’s where you got to, is it?” he said.

“Um…” said Crowley.

“I’m sorry,” said Aziraphale, wringing himself out. “Am I missing something?”

“Didn’t you get my message?” Crowley asked Leonardo.

“Yes, I got your fucking message. And I know when I’m being given the runaround.”

“The runaround?” said Crowley.

“I’m so confused,” said Aziraphale, apparently in a race to the bottom to beat Crowley at being the stupidest person in the room.

“Look, it’s a work thing,” Crowley explained. “We work together.”

Leonardo wasn’t having it. “You could have had this,” he said, gesturing to himself. “And instead you went with _that_?”

“I didn’t,” said Crowley, as Leonardo stormed off. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse him. He’s an artist, you know. Very temperamental.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Aziraphale, pushing him away. “Please. Go and smooth things over. I’ve got to get this in soak anyway. Wine is an absolute nightmare to shift.”

Crowley looked back at Aziraphale, and then back at the door. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s none of my business what you get up, Crowley,” said Aziraphale, and that much was true. Crowley apologised once more and fled in pursuit of Leonardo.

He found him a couple of streets away, stomping back towards Verrocchio’s.

“Leonardo,” said Crowley, running to catch up. “It’s not what you think.”

“I don’t care,” said Leonardo, and kept walking.

“It’s a work thing.”

“I told you: I don’t care.”

“I’m not…” Crowley began, and then – through the fog of booze – realised he had no way of explaining himself to a jealous human. And that he really ought to sober up, because his mouth was still making a series of extremely unhelpful noises. “…I don’t, I mean, _we_ don’t…not like that. Not like me and you.”

Leonardo turned on his heel and sighed. “There is something very wrong with you,” he said.

Crowley nodded. “That’s fair.”

“I think you might be Satan.”

“I’m not Satan,” said Crowley, all too graphically reminded of this fact when a light Tuscan breeze wafted past a nearby fullery and delivered the eyewatering stench right to his sensitive nose. “You think Satan would be hanging around _this part_ of Florence late at night? No, no, no. Satan has _people_ for that kind of thing.”

“People?” said Leonardo.

“Well, demons.”

Leonardo stepped closer. Save from a dull light from a nearby upstairs window it was very dark, but Leonardo seemed to have better night vision than most people. He reached up and removed Crowley’s glasses, and for a split second Crowley almost thought he’d been played, tested – not by some secret agent of Heaven but rather one of Hell. “You have yellow eyes,” said Leonardo, without rancor, just stating observable facts. “The soles of your feet look like snakeskin, and your tongue has more than one tip. And today you took a dead bird out of the cage and returned it to the sky. And don’t tell me he swooned, because that bird was dead. I may be younger than you, but I’ve spent enough time in morgues and charnel houses to know what dead looks like.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley, and realised there would be no harm in telling him. Leonardo was the kind of person that other humans seldom believed, largely because he had an annoying habit of being right. “Don’t get excited. I’m low on the whole pecking order, although at one point I did have a bit of a starring role. I was in the book, you know.”

“The book?”

“Yeah. Genesis. Not even a supporting role.” It shouldn’t have felt this good to come clean, not for a demon who was supposed to be one of Hell’s finest liars. “I was pivotable, some might say. Wait, no. Pivotable? Is that a word. No. Pivotal. That’s it. I was _pivotal_.”

Leonardo stared long and hard at him, pupils enormous in the dark. “Are all demons like you?” he said.

Crowley had to think about that one for a moment, which was no easy feet when your back teeth were still swimming in a rather nice wine from a place called Chianti. He’d always been a bit different to the other demons. Better personal hygiene, for a start. “No,” he said.

Leonardo nodded. “I was going to say…if they were, Hell would be a lot less efficient.”

“Hey, I’m efficient,” said Crowley. “I’m the efficientest demon they have. Mass corruption, mass temptation – that’s my bag. None of this whittling away at a single soul for decades. I can have it done like _that_.” He snapped his fingers and realised too late that he shouldn’t have, because whenever Crowley snapped his fingers Things Happened.

A door behind him creaked open all on his own, but time continued to flow past them in the usual fashion, nothing was noticeably on fire, and they hadn’t both been plunged into a puddle of hellish darkness so dense that it absorbed all light around it. “Shit,” said Crowley.

“What?” said Leonardo.

“Nothing,” said Crowley, and turned towards the open door. “I should…probably make sure I haven’t caused too much mischief. Should probably sober up as well, while I’m at it.”

Leonardo followed him into the building. “What do you mean?” he said. “Make sure you haven’t caused too much mischief? Isn’t mischief your business? What kind of demon are you, anyway?”

In his own way, Leonardo was every bit as annoying as Aziraphale. It was rather sweet, really.

Crowley kept walking, searching the building for evidence of writhing nests of snakes, columns of inverted flames, coveted items of patisserie – basically any of the things that sometimes manifested when he carelessly snapped his fingers. Instead there was nothing, just a thing that looked like a torture machine and a strange new smell. No, not new, he thought, breathing it in and rolling it over his tongue. It smelled like both the inside of a chimney and the linseed oil that Leonardo used in his studio, and while neither of the smells were unfamiliar on their own, this combination of the two of them was.

As far as he could tell he hadn’t snapped anything nefarious into accidental existence, although that torture machine looked nasty. Crowley knew immediately that it was nothing to do with him, because it had every appearance of something that had sprung from a human mind in one shape and been tinkered into one substantially different due to the practical restraints of reality. By far the most upsetting part of the whole apparatus was the enormous screw that looked like it had once been part of a wine press. Crowley approached, horribly curious as how it was supposed to be employed.

“What are you doing?” said Leonardo.

“Not sure,” said Crowley. “But I feel as if I should be taking notes.” He leaned closer and touched the metal plate. The surface was uneven and his fingers came away black. Ink. “Oh, wait – I know this,” he said. “It’s not a torture machine at all. It’s the thingy.”

“The thingy?”

“Yeah. The Gutenberg thingamagig…the press. Moveable type. Infinite copies.” He snapped his fingers – this time on purpose – and several candles flickered into life, illuminating the printers’ workshop. The letters were backwards, on blocks that you could presumably move around, making it say whatever you wanted it to say. “Apparently you can pervert the word of God with this.”

Leonardo, a sucker for anything mechanical, crept closer to join him. Crowley picked up a page from a stack on a table and stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out why it didn’t make sense. It was only after a moment that he realised why – the page was in English and he’d been expecting to read Italian. Of course. The printers obviously knew their business: Aziraphale had mentioned England was one of those countries where translations of the Bible were taking off in a big way. On the page was the story of Abraham and Isaac, one of those many episodes that made Crowley glad that he no longer had to deal with the Lord’s mysterious ways. So his boss was literally Satan but you never caught Satan being all ‘kill your kid, kill your kid, kill your kid, kill your kid…ha ha, you were totally going to do it, too.’

Okay, no – maybe that was _exactly_ the kind of thing Satan would do, but at least he wouldn’t do it while pretending to be a benevolent supreme being. You knew where you stood with Satan.

Crowley picked up the next page. It was the same. And the next, and the next, and the next, and it tickled his fancy in the way it always did when someone figured out how to work smart instead of hard. He put down the pages and tried to move the type, and it performed exactly as promised – it came away in his inky fingers. He looked at the letter – a backwards G – and smiled, impressed. How unbelievably _easy_.

He picked out another letter and swapped them around. “Nice.”

“What are you doing?”

“I think,” said Crowley. “That I just perverted the word of God. That’s amazing. That is…efficient.”

Leonardo squinted at the moveable type. Of course he could read backwards. He wrote backwards all the time. Said it was easier, being left-handed. “You perverted the word of God,” he said. “By moving two letters so now it says Dog instead of God?”

“Yep,” said Crowley. “Infinite copies. Until someone discovers the mistake this page is going to start with ‘Dog wished to test Abraham’s obedience.’ Incredible, right?”

Leonardo straightened up and blinked slowly. “And this is what demons do?”

“This one does.”

“There is something terribly wrong with you, Tonio.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley. “I know. In my defence, I am quite drunk.” He swayed closer, beguiled by the way Leonardo’s hair shone in the candlelight. He cupped a cheek, smudging ink. “And you’re extremely gorgeous.”

“You’re also drunk.”

“Yes. And when I sober up in the morning you’ll still be gorgeous.”

Leonardo smiled and thawed, winding his arms around Crowley’s neck. “Are you drunk enough to sit still?” he said, teasing with tiny kisses that tasted faintly of linseed oil. Crowley’s thumb had transferred ink to the corner of his mouth.

It took Crowley a moment to realise what he was on about. “No,” he said, thinking of at least a dozen things he’d rather be doing. “You don’t want to _draw_. Not tonight.”

“Yes, tonight,” said Leonardo, playfully pulling his hair. “And always. You have to be nice to me tonight, Tonio, because I’m jealous and stupid. I need to be soothed.”

“You need to be fucked.”

Leonardo nipped his bottom lip. “Yes, I was counting on that, too.”

When the sun rose over Florence Leonardo had his fun. He made Crowley strip naked and assume a ridiculous reclining pose with one finger pointing at the door, and then – when Crowley complained that his arm was tired and could they please do something more interesting – he showed Crowley what he’d drawn. Just the hand, ink smudges and all.

“You made me pose like that for hours?” said Crowley.

“Yes.”

“Just so you could draw my hand?”

Leonardo snorted with laughter. “Yes.”

“And I suppose you think that’s funny?”

“I do, yes. Very funny.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re difficult?”

“God, yes,” said Leonardo, pulling him down on the bed. “All the time.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” said Crowley.

“I know. I’m a pest. You should probably spank me.”

Crowley considered it. It took him all of about five seconds. “All right. Can’t hurt to try, I suppose.”

* * *

It was always going to end. Crowley knew that. He just didn’t expect the end to come so soon.

He knew something was up when he entered the alleyway on the way to their room. Usually the narrow street was full of rent boys looking for trade, but today it was deserted. No, not deserted. It was…occupied, but not by a person. By a smell. A smell that was distinct and revolting even by the standards of fifteenth century Europe, which took some doing.

“Fuck,” said Crowley. He knew that smell.

He walked a little deeper into the alleyway and located the source of the unholy stench, hovering in a doorway that his presence had rendered almost completely lightless.

“Hello, Hastur.”

“Crowley,” said Hastur. “Heard I’d find you here. Tempting to Lust, are we?”

“Yep,” said Crowley. “Totally. Lots of tempting going on here. Working hard, as usual.”

Hastur narrowed huge black insect eyes. “Didn’t think Lust was your area.”

“Well, you know. I think it’s good to expand your range. I know provoking to Wrath is a lot more my area, but I don’t want to get stuck in a rut, you know?”

“Your diligence does you credit, Crowley.”

“Thank you, Lord Hastur,” said Crowley, staring nervously into those reflective eyes. He was suddenly desperately afraid for Leonardo. Had a human ever improved a demon before? And if they had, what had happened to them? Nothing good. Of that much he was certain. “Was there something I can help you with?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said Hastur. “The civil wars are kicking off in England again.”

“Are they now?” Oh God. England. Terrible weather. Worse food.

“Rather promising prince in the House of York. Could be a big acquisition for us.” Hastur smiled a thin and deeply horrible smile. No teeth, which was relief. The addition of teeth always made his smile – impossibly enough given how horrible the no-teeth version was – a thousand times more unpleasant. “Recommended you personally for the job, actually.”

“Oh. Oh, well. Thank you.”

And that was that. There was no getting away from it. When a Duke of Hell caught you lounging around putting your feet up in the middle of a civil war you had to get off your arse and look busy. “But I haven’t _finished_ ,” said Leonardo, when Crowley told him. “I wanted to paint you properly, not just your hands.”

“I’m sorry,” said Crowley. “I don’t want to go either, but it’s a work thing. I’ll be back.”

Leonardo folded his arms. “You won’t.”

“I will.”

“You won’t. I’ve heard that one before. They talk about forever and always, and then they go off. And get married.”

Crowley snorted. “Who am _I_ going to marry?”

“I don’t know. Some demoness?” Leonardo thought for a moment. “Succubuses…succubi. You have those, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Crowley. “But trust me, they’re not the marrying type.” He’d never had much to do with them, but he knew their line of work and imagined it would be very difficult to find a man willing to play stepfather to a hundred or so freshly spawned minor demons. “Look,” he said, if only to confirm it to himself. “I’ll be back. I will. And maybe then you’ll be famous, painting angels in the Vatican.”

Leonardo sighed and unthawed a little, his arms unfolding. “Fine,” he said. “If you must go, go, but tell me one thing before you do.”

“Anything.”

“Are angels real?”

“Yes,” said Crowley, knowing why he asked. Same reason he asked anything. “And yes, you got the wings right.”

He left Italy the same night, headed back to England, where there had been an unseemly outbreak of peace during so many years of uninterrupted war. Nobody had come up with the phrase ‘family values’ yet, but when they did it always made Crowley smile, its fake wholesomeness always reminding him of the way the descendants of John of Gaunt had carried on. And carry on they did. Once they’d finished kicking the shit out of their cousins they moved closer to home and started knocking off brothers and nephews. Kept everything in the family, including marriage and murder. As a bad influence Crowley was pretty much surplus to requirements, although as soon as he landed in England he got an obvious whiff of why he’d been sent here: the angel was here somewhere, up to good.

Crowley caught up with Aziraphale in Leicester, on an unseasonably damp late August night in 1483. He found Aziraphale standing outside a Dominican priory, where several black robed friars were shuffling inside carrying a blood stained and suspiciously king shaped bundle into the church for hasty and embarrassed burial. Aziraphale was clutching a book to his chest and wearing a milder version of the perpetual ‘oh dear’ expression he’d worn almost continually throughout the Black Death. His gaze hardened when he saw Crowley and he pursed his lips.

“Well, how unsurprising to see you here,” he said. “Come to gloat over the acquisition of a royal soul?”

“No,” said Crowley. “I had instructions, all right? Downstairs was breathing down my neck about it. And don’t look at me like that. I had nothing to do with the nephews. He came up with that all on his own.”

“And the rest?”

“All right. I did do the Malmsey butt.”

“Yes, I thought that was you,” said Aziraphale. “Only you would come up with something like drowning a soak in his favourite tipple.”

“Aw. You say the nicest things.”

“It wasn’t a compliment, you fiend.” Aziraphale sighed and shook his head. “He had such tremendous potential for good, I thought.”

“He was human. They’re complicated.”

“Really? Because killing children seems pretty uncomplicatedly evil to me.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley, thinking back to the Ark. “Did you ever square that with Upstairs, by the way?”

Aziraphale guessed where his mind was and glared. “Stop it. You’re doing it again.”

“Can’t help it,” said Crowley. “You know me. I ask questions.”

“Yes. You do. And that’s why you ended up…” Aziraphale pointed vaguely downwards. “You know.”

“Meh. Someone’s got to ask questions, angel,” said Crowley. “Otherwise it all gets a bit…fourteenth century. And nobody wants that.” He glanced at the book in Aziraphale’s hands. “What’s that you’ve got there? Bible?”

“Yes.”

“How many of those have you got now?”

Aziraphale looked shifty. “I don’t know,” he said. “I might have a bit of a problem, actually.”

“How do you have a problem with the Bible? Well, other than the egregious lies about yours truly, obviously…”

“I keep…acquiring them,” said Aziraphale. “Got a bit of a collection, I’m afraid. I’m worried it might be a compulsion or something. I thought the printing press might help me with that, but so far it hasn’t.”

“Okay,” said Crowley, even more confused than before. “Explain?”

“Well, I used to collect them because of the illuminations, you see. Every one was unique, hand written and hand painted. I thought ‘Oh, well, if they’re churning them all out to order with moveable type then they’ll be identical’ – and a lot less _collectable_ to silly old hoarders like me.”

“Right. With you so far.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “Unfortunately I didn’t count on misprints in the moveable type. Makes them extremely rare.”

“Oh dear,” said Crowley.

“Yes. You see the problem. If I carry on like this it’s only going to be a matter of centuries before I need a place to put them all. Have to build a library or something.” Aziraphale gave a short, frustrated sigh. “Do you ever worry that you have a lack of self-control?”

“Not me, no,” said Crowley. “I mean, I do, but I celebrate it. What kind of misprints are we talking about here, by the way?”

“Oh, stupid things, really. Where it says gaudium instead of gladium, or accidentally says Jebus.” Aziraphale pressed his lips tight together in a hurry but he couldn’t conceal the mirth crinkling the edges of his eyes.

“You don’t think it’s perverting the word of God, then?” Crowley said, amused.

“Of course not,” said Aziraphale, straightening his face with some difficulty. “The Word of God is far bigger than ink and paper. No, this is just…errata. And rather funny.”

It wasn’t that funny, but if Aziraphale found it funny then _that_ was hilarious. If a laughing angel was the result, then Crowley resolved to do a whole lot more drunken messing around in print shops. He could even argue to his superiors that he was corrupting one of the Heavenly Host while doing so, even though Aziraphale’s smile had that annoying habit of leaving him feeling more than a little blessed.

The abbey bell tolled for the last Plantagenet king of England. “So,” said Crowley. “What do you reckon this Welsh bloke will turn out to be like?”

“Henry Tudor? Oh, goodness knows. Can’t be much worse than the last lot. And at least he’s an adult. It all goes very badly whenever a child is in charge. Just look at those unfortunate nephews, and that poor little boy in Milan.”

“Milan?”

“Haven’t you heard?” said Aziraphale, slipping his arm into Crowley’s as they turned away in search of a pub. Twice now he’d done that. And in the same century. “It’s all been going on over there. You know the duke was assassinated just after you left Italy? Left the title in the hands of his seven year old son.”

“Oh shit,” said Crowley, his heart beating strangely. “And how did that go?”

“About as well as you’d expect. I think the boy’s still alive, but his uncle Ludovico has him more or less under house arrest. Oh, and speaking of Ludovico Sforza, you’ll never guess who’s working for him now.”

“Who?”

“Leonardo,” said Aziraphale. “You know. That Florentine you were so sweet on for some reason.”

“I wasn’t…sweet,” said Crowley. “I was just…we were friends. That was all.”

The look on Aziraphale’s face was something else. Crowley knew that look very well. It was the same look that Eve had worn when trying very hard not to look as interested as she felt, and as looks go it had always done something dreadful to Crowley, deep down in the darkest corners of what would eventually – a few centuries later – be labelled as his id. To Crowley, curiosity was potent enough, but to see it etched on the face of an angel – an angel, no less, one of those bland, obedient jobsworths – was a revelation.

“Are you allowed to have friends?” asked Aziraphale.

It was a straightforward question, but the answers – and the feelings – that it stirred in Crowley were complicated to say the least. “Do you know,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

Crowley sighed. “Angel, stop asking difficult questions. That’s my job. You don’t want to end up doing my job – trust me. The amounts of laundry involved alone…”

“Laundry?” said Aziraphale.

“Shut up,” said Crowley, and hurried him towards the pub. It was starting to rain. Terrible weather.


	3. Chapter 3

Aziraphale stared at the drawing on his phone, then back to Crowley’s pointed finger. “Well, good Lord,” he said. “It was _ink_.”

“Yep.”

“All this time I’ve been collecting old Bibles with misprints…and it was you all along.”

Crowley shrugged and sloshed out the last of the wine into Aziraphale’s glass. Throughout the telling of his tale they had left the bed and relocated to the small dining table to drink their heads off. “You gave me the idea,” he said. “When you were talking about perverting the word of God. You know me – work smart, not hard.”

“You know it never perverted the word of God at all, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know,” said Crowley. “But it made you laugh. And I love making you laugh.”

Aziraphale made heart-eyes over the rim of his wine glass. Under the table his bare foot nuzzled Crowley’s calf. “You make me so happy,” he said, and then – in another one of those firsts that made Crowley’s head spin every time. “Anthony.”

“Do you like it?” said Crowley, pulse thrumming like a hummingbird at the bottom of his throat. “The first time you heard that name you did…you know. The face.”

“I did not do the face,” said Aziraphale, who absolutely had. “Anyway, we were being held at gunpoint by Nazis at the time. Not sure how you were expecting me to look. And yes, I do like it, now that I know the meaning of it.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley.

_Antonio is the saint of lost things._

He shivered, feeling that hand in his hair all over again. A shaking bed frame, an open bird cage, church bells clanking the hour over the red roofs of Florence. And a warm body in his arms, a lover who said ‘I am yours’, even though now he was everybody’s, his name a touchstone for genius, his works reproduced on an electronic screen at the touch of a finger. If only Leonardo could have seen this, Crowley thought, not the first time he’d thought that over the long centuries. The first time he’d seen a photograph and a film, the first time he’d seen a lightbulb or lifted a telephone – Crowley had always thought the same thing. _If Leonardo could see this…_

His throat ached, and his eyes were wet before he could stop himself. Aziraphale reached out and pulled his chair closer. “He gave you that name,” said Aziraphale. “Is that why it took you four hundred years to tell me?”

Crowley nodded, barely trusting his voice. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“You loved him,” said Aziraphale, with that weird, shining certainty that came over him whenever he talked about that familiar substance.

This time Crowley only nodded.

“It’s all right, you know,” said the angel. “You’re allowed to love.”

“I know,” said Crowley. “But I didn’t know that at the time. I wish I’d known, for his sake. I never told him.”

Aziraphale’s hand caressed his bare knee under the table. “Oh, Crowley. He knew. Nobody can be loved by you and _not_ know about it. Trust me. I have thousands of years of experience on that score.” The hand moved higher, warm on his thigh under his robe. “Come back to bed, my darling. Let me show you.”

They returned to the bed. Crowley had dried his eyes but Aziraphale still handled him with infinite care, as though the centuries of unspoken grief had made him liable to shatter or break. Aziraphale brushed his lips over the furred lines of Crowley’s eyebrows, kissed the damp lids of his eyes and the trembling corners of his mouth. He moved lower, his mouth skimming neck and nipples, kissing his way down each arm, fastening knowing lips on the sensitive crook of an elbow and sucking slow and hard, hard enough to bring the blood to the surface of the thin skin. “Do you remember?” he said. “The first time we went to bed together. You told me that in the strictest sense of the word, I was your first and only lover? That wasn’t quite true, was it?”

Crowley swallowed hard, his fingers in Aziraphale’s curls. “I don’t…I suppose so. But I didn’t know what to do with it. That feeling. I didn’t…I didn’t think it was allowed, or even _possible_ for the likes of me.”

“Nevertheless, you felt it,” said Aziraphale. “Even if you didn’t know what it was.” He rubbed his cheek against Crowley’s belly like a cat. “I’m sorry that you were so lonely.”

“Don’t. What could you have done about it?”

“Well, nothing. Probably couldn’t even have told you that I was lonely, too, but here we are. And we don’t have to be lonely anymore, do we?”

The corners of Aziraphale’s lips were stained with wine, a darker red against the pink that grew deeper and richer whenever his heart beat harder and his mouth opened wide to moan and swear and vow that he’d never, ever felt this way before. “I love you,” Crowley said, helpless and hopeless all over again. “I have always loved you. Even when I didn’t know I could love, I loved you.”

“I love you, too,” said Aziraphale, and bowed his head. He always did this with the same mixture of fascination and delighted greed with which he put anything into his mouth, and it only took a couple of laps of his inquisitive tongue to bring Crowley’s hips off the bed and make him dig his heels into the mattress. Aziraphale’s hands came up underneath him, claiming, cradling. When he sucked he moaned like he was stuffing his face with cake, determined to taste everything, as usual. He was never satisfied with just cock: he always had to dip his head even lower to lick and nuzzle at Crowley’s balls, and then his hands slid out from under Crowley, pushing his thighs up and open. Just the thought of what was coming next made Crowley shameless and he rolled back on the end of his spine, raising the soles of his feet to the ceiling. He felt the heat of Aziraphale’s ragged breath and then the touch of wine-stained angel lips in a place where once Crowley would never have imagined anyone would want to kiss. And Aziraphale had done more than kiss. He’d snuffled like a truffle pig and turned Crowley into a bizarre and indecent delicacy on more occasions than Crowley had had hot dinners. His tongue flickered and circled, turning Crowley’s spine to liquid and making him hitch his knees even higher and _beg_.

Aziraphale let him, clearly relishing his desperation. He went on licking and teasing and probing, until Crowley was slick and slutty and tormented with the need to be filled. Finally, when he relented, he said “Would you like me to fuck you now?” in a voice so polite and so perfectly him that Crowley came even more unravelled and couldn’t say anything besides yes. Yes to it all, yes to whatever he wanted, yes yes yes as Aziraphale breached him and pulled him on as carefully as if he’d been a cotton glove donned to handle a rare manuscript.

“Please,” Crowley said, struggling to remember how words worked. “Hard. It want it hard.”

Aziraphale teased, rocking slowly into him. “Ask nicely.”

“Fuck me,” he said, and was rewarded with a stirring jab of the hips.

“That’s better,” said Aziraphale, and gave him only a little of what he wanted, because this was part of the game after all. Crowley had to ask for it, and he did, over and over, lifting up his voice over the squeak of the bed frame. They were getting loud, but what else was Paris for if not having noisy sex in hotel beds? And they were good at this by now. It was like a well-worn conversation they’d had a thousand times before, and Crowley knew the cues, the catches of breath and stutters of hips that meant it was time to let himself go, so that he could pull Aziraphale over the edge with him. Only this time he slowed, pushed the unseen parts of himself into the spaces between subatomic particles and stretched time as easily as though it was chewing gum. He came in exquisite slow motion, feeling every ripple and shudder rolling through his body, the drawn out clenches of his muscles inviting Aziraphale to join him. Aziraphale moaned and held him tighter, slowly, so slowly, so that Crowley could feel the pressure of each fingertip digging into his hip, and imagined that he could even feel the tiny capillaries bursting beneath the surface of his skin, where he would find bruises the next day, because Aziraphale didn’t know his own strength. He spilled over in long, sticky spurts, his cries mingling with Aziraphale’s. His eyes were wet all over again and Aziraphale swore, shook and came with him. As time contracted once more Crowley felt the building shudder around him, and the scaffolding around Notre Dame trembled audibly.

“Mind the cathedral,” he said.

Aziraphale gasped and rolled off him. “Sorry,” he said, and the Île de la Cité stopped shaking. “Good Lord. What did you do?”

“Slowed down time. What did you think?”

Aziraphale’s idiotic smile said it all. “I think,” he said. “We might have to save that kind of thing for Outer Mongolia. Not sure it’s quite safe for populated areas.” He kissed Crowley’s shoulder and nuzzled in, so warm and soft that Crowley couldn’t resist snapping his fingers and cleaning up the mess, the sooner to be cuddled up together between clean sheets. Sex with Aziraphale was always fun, but sometimes – when he was basking in the light of what was sometimes a literal afterglow – Crowley thought that this was the point of it all, all this touching and gazing and sighing with the pleasure of sated need. And Aziraphale glowed, the way he had the first time. He lay rumpled and golden, with his fingers twined in Crowley’s hair and the blond tips of his eyelashes gilded with some inner light whose source Crowley couldn’t see, at least not right at this moment.

“What are you looking at?” Aziraphale said, as thought it wasn’t obvious.

“You,” said Crowley, rubbing the tips of their noses together. Aziraphale’s fingers tugged at the roots of his hair. “You’re always extra glowy whenever we make love.”

Aziraphale hummed softly with laughter and stole a kiss. “I always thought that was a funny expression.”

“What was?”

“Make love. As though we were creating something tangible. Physical.”

“It is physical. _Very_ physical. I’m sorry, were you not paying attention to what just happened?”

“Well, yes, obviously, but physically the only thing we’re really making is a mess.”

“Not always,” said Crowley, running his toes down the back of Aziraphale’s calf. “Sometimes we make plants. And wine. And fire. Oh, and that one time we thought we’d made a person.”

“Yes, but we weren’t trying to make those things,” said Aziraphale. “Most of the time it _is_ just a sticky mess.”

“Shut up,” said Crowley. “You love a sticky mess.”

Aziraphale laughed. “It seems…disproportionate.”

“To what?”

“To the intangible. It’s a small sticky mess and a huge intangible…thing.” He frowned and Crowley couldn’t help but lean forward and kiss the little notch it made between his eyebrows. “I think I might still be getting the hang of it after all these years.”

“What? Love? You’re _literally_ made of it.”

“I know,” said Aziraphale. “But I’m literally made of lots of things, and many of them are still mysterious to me. I’m over six thousand years old and I’m not a hundred per cent sure how my circulatory system works. Doesn’t make it any less of a wonder, even if that vein in my ankle keeps on playing up.”

Crowley had no idea what to say to that, so he just settled for saying for saying exactly what he was thinking. “I can’t believe I married you.”

“Oh dear. Having regrets?”

“No. Just wondering what the fuck I ever did to get this lucky.”

“Darling…” Aziraphale glowed a little brighter, even though his eyelids were growing heavy. “You’re all mine.”

“And I’m yours.”

He patted Crowley’s hip in a way that Crowley knew meant it was time for him to roll over, push his bum into the curve of Aziraphale’s lap and doze off in a way that had once been the substance of his wildest, loneliest dreams. A church bell rang the hour, not the fire-silenced cathedral bell but Sainte Chapelle, reassuring Crowley that at least they hadn’t managed to demolish it and that Aziraphale wouldn’t start indulging in the kind of reckless miracles he was prone to whenever ecclesiastical architecture was threatened or damaged. He yawned hugely and settled into his coveted position as the little spoon.

“One thing,” Aziraphale said, nuzzling at the nape of his neck.

“What’s that?”

“Did he ever know? The man who painted angels? Did he ever find out that he once threw a drink over one?”

Crowley trembled with something that might have been laughter or something much more complicated. “No,” he said, smiling in the dark at the memory. “I never did tell him that.”

He lay quiet for a long time, feeling Aziraphale’s breath slow and deepen against the back of his shoulder. It carried a whiff of something otherworldly, ethereal. Aziraphale always smelled a whole lot less human and a whole lot more angel when he was sleeping, as though it took consciousness to restrain his nature. And maybe it did, because his first experiments with unconsciousness had resulted in mountains of German porn and tragically short lived rooftop terraces. As Aziraphale sank deeper into sleep Crowley could feel the creaks and groans of reality adjusting – once again – to being stress tested by the uncontrolled thoughts of a dreaming angel. But it was okay. Aziraphale was much better at containing his dreams than he used to be, and besides, they seemed to be quite interesting if the increasingly firm sleep erection pressed against Crowley’s rump was any indication.

Crowley closed his eyes and let himself slip beneath the surface, his limbs deliciously heavy and his breathing slowing in time with Aziraphale’s. He heard the shriek of seagulls somewhere and knew instinctively that they weren’t coming from the Seine. They were coming from Aziraphale, whose dream was seeping far enough beyond its usual confines for Crowley to seize on the sound and follow it to its source.

_…Key Largo, Montego, baby, why don’t we go…_

The tune floated in the background, behind the calls of the gulls and the sound of a gentle breeze stirring through the palm trees. The dream took shape – azure seas, blue skies, white sands. Crowley found himself standing on a wooden pier above crystal turquoise waters. The pier was one of many that connected a network of beach huts on stilts, and he knew before he even entered the hut that it would have a glass floor so that you could watch the fish swimming around below. Aziraphale had clearly been reading the holiday brochures.

“Bora Bora,” Crowley muttered, raising his face to the sun and closing his eyes, soaking up the warmth. “Here we fucking go.”

This was a dream, so he knew which hut to go to, even before he heard the throaty, baritone moans coming from within. And that gave him cause to pause, because he knew those moans very well. Intimately, even.

Crowley tiptoed across the glass floor, oblivious to the fish and far more interested in figuring out why Aziraphale seemed to be having such a good time without him. The bedroom door was ajar, and it swung open silently when Crowley pushed it. Not that Aziraphale would have heard it anyway. The angel lay spreadeagled on a huge, low white bed, head back, hands fisting the sheets, feet in the air. He was covered up to the chest in a sheet, but the person shaped bulge beneath the linen suggested that he had company. Very friendly company, judging by the noises he was making. 

“…yes…oh yes, _there_ , darling…yes, deeper…please… _more_ …”

Crowley cleared his throat. Aziraphale raised his head and gave a yelp of surprise, closing his legs quickly and startling whoever it was that was under the covers. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, _shit_.”

“What?” said a familiar voice.

“Nothing. Stay down.” Aziraphale pulled the sheet up to his chin and turned crimson. “Oh dear.”

“Your dream looked interesting,” said Crowley. “Thought I’d pop in, that’s all. Didn’t realise you already had company.”

“He did,” said the voice, and as the speaker emerged Crowley understood why he’d recognised the voice. It was his own.

“I’m sorry,” said Aziraphale. “I was already dreaming about you, you see. Oh, this _is_ awkward.”

“Just a bit,” said Crowley.

“I don’t see why,” said the other Crowley, the dream one. “What’s the problem? It’s your two favourite sexual partners, right here in the same bed.”

Aziraphale looked like someone had just plugged his libido into the mains socket.

“Really?” Crowley said, knowing he’d never be able to resist that expression. “I catch you in bed with my husband and your first instinct is to tell me to go fuck myself? Literally?”

“Yes,” said Other Crowley. “I’m you.”

“Wow. Was I always this much of an arsehole?”

“No,” said Other Crowley. “Sometimes you’re worse.” He nudged Aziraphale. “What do you think, angel? Are you up for—”

“—oh yes,” said Aziraphale, jumping in before he could even finish the question. “Rather.”

There was no arguing with that kind of enthusiasm. “All right, then,” said Crowley, and began to undress.

* * *

Aziraphale was smiling when they boarded the Eurostar in Paris. He was still beaming when they arrived home in London, and when angels smiled, you knew about it. He wafted a cloud of beatification everywhere he went, drifting past crying babies and making them gulp, gurgle and then – once they’d gurgled their way through inarticulate surprise at their mood changing so rapidly – begin to giggle and coo. When Crowley went to pour milk in his coffee, Aziraphale smiled at the jug and the milk turned to cream mid-pour, leaving flecks of white unctuous fat floating suggestively on the surface.

“Stop it,” said Crowley. “Get a grip of yourself. Anyone would think you’d never been the filling in a demonic sex sandwich before.”

“I hadn’t,” said Aziraphale, and continued looking unnecessarily radiant. The trip back to London had been nervewracking. In these unguarded moods Aziraphale could get distinctly seismic, and Crowley had no desire to be on a train underneath the English Channel if and when that happened. Crowley was glad to be back in the relative safety of the West End, where the humans had got – if not exactly used to strange things happening – then at least vaguely accepting of the fact that they sometimes did. Earth tremors, occasional fires, diabetic toes being raised from the dead – these things happened, and that was okay.

“I meant to ask you,” Aziraphale said, as he breezed into the bookshop, making all the plants take notice. “Is that what they refer to as a ‘spitroast’?”

“Yes,” said Crowley, starting to wonder if he’d ever be able to singularly satisfy his husband ever again. “How the hell do you run a bookshop in Soho for two hundred years and not know that much about what we got up to on Saturday night?”

“Well, I’m very old, dear. I forget things. Sometimes it’s in one ear and out the other with me.” Aziraphale stuck a finger into the soil of an African violet. “Hmm. Looks like you could use a drop of water,” he said, and Crowley could have sworn the violet quivered with something approximating erotic anticipation. “Did you see the cat anywhere, by the way?”

“Meh, she’s probably somewhere,” said Crowley. “Or everywhere. Or nowhere. You know what cats are like.”

“Schrodinger’s experiments would have gone very differently if a dog had been involved,” said Aziraphale, bustling over to the sink to fill the plant mister. “Or if Pavlov had decided to go with cats. Can’t train a cat to salivate on demand. Can’t even coax the buggers to respect the rules of physics most of the time.” He wandered back to the violet and puffed a fine mist of water over its leaves. The plant lathered shamelessly in his attention, and when Aziraphale moved on to attend to a fern, Crowley leaned close and glared at it.

“Yes,” he said, under his breath. “ _I’m_ still here.”

The violet shrunk, as was only right and proper. Aziraphale made them lazy. If he had his way they’d flower when they felt like it, not when they were supposed to.

Something stirred on the couch, catching Crowley’s eye. Initially he thought it was the cat, but on closer inspection it turned out to be another cat – a tabby. “All right,” said Crowley, reaching down to pet it. “Where did you come from, then?”

At that moment Madam strolled over. Now there were two of them, which was weird. Crowley had only been away for a long weekend. “Aziraphale?”

“Yes, dear?”

“You know cats? How long does it take them to make other cats?”

Aziraphale came over. “How do you mean?”

“There are two of them,” said Crowley. “Did they…multiply or something?”

“She’s a cat, Crowley,” said Aziraphale. “Not an amoeba. She didn’t simply split.” The tabby strolled along the arm of the sofa and started rubbing its cheek against Aziraphale’s sleeve. “I expect this one just wandered in because there was food.” The tabby began to purr at the volume of a small motorboat. “Oh my. You are a friendly one, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, all right. You don’t have to rub it in. All of God’s creatures adore you. We know.”

Aziraphale remained unabashed. “Ignore Mr Grumpy,” he told the doting tabby. “Who’s a good fluffums, then?”

Madam – who had finally developed a sense of occasion – horked loudly on a hairball, making Crowley laugh. He was relieved to see that her fluffy white fever coat hadn’t got any worse while he was away. If anything she looked a bit more like her old tortoiseshell self, and when he gave her side a furtive squeeze he could tell that she’d been eating well in their absence.

“That’s nice, isn’t it?” he said. “You perk up for the neighbour but act all sickly when I’m around.”

“She wasn’t sickly,” said Aziraphale. “She was just…shedding. Anyway, you would never have agreed to Paris if you were really worried.” He leaned in to croon to the tabby again. “Are you going to stay with us, too? You will be loved. Yes, you will.”

“Wait…what? Two cats?”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, with an expression that brooked no argument. “I think it’s a natural progression, don’t you? We don’t want Madam growing up spoiled.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” said Crowley. She already treated their bed like it was her own, no matter how many times Aziraphale tried to chase her off with the ironing spray.

“Nonsense. You’re never too old to learn,” said Aziraphale. “Look at you. You’re over six thousand years old and you only just learned how to cook. I’m sure all the cat needs is a good example.”

Crowley eyed the tabby. “How do you know that one is even up for providing a good example?”

“Oh, it will,” said Aziraphale, with a divine certainty that made the tabby look suddenly nervous. Crowley could only sympathise, because the cat had clearly already fallen in love with Aziraphale, and that was the trouble with being in love with Aziraphale: he made you _do better_. Worse, he made you _want_ to.

So it was with a certain amount of resignation that Crowley went off and started Googling signwriters in the Greater London area. Aziraphale hadn’t brought up the sign again, but Crowley knew it was only a matter of time, and he also knew that Aziraphale would want it painted by human hands rather than simply miracled into existence. The previous sign had been painted during a shop facelift in 1889, after Aziraphale had installed better street lighting and saw that his previous sign was getting on for a hundred years old and looked its age. Besides, you only had to look at the strange smile of Lisa Gherardini to see that sometimes only a human could do the job. An angel couldn’t have painted the Mona Lisa, and neither could a demon. Only a creature cursed – and perhaps equally blessed – with their very great grandmother’s curiosity could pull off a thing like that.

Under the gaze of his own personal Mona Lisa, Crowley picked out a signwriter, sent them an email, and then went back downstairs to feed the cats.

The sign took a while, on account of Christmas getting in the way. Among other gifts, Aziraphale sent Crowley a pair of bunny slippers, purportedly from the cats. If anyone but Aziraphale had made that gesture Crowley felt sure he would have vomited himself inside out, but it was Aziraphale, after all. And it was adorable. And the slippers were nice and warm.

The cats made themselves increasingly at home, although Madam started looking pale and fluffy again. Crowley put this down to the tabby, who – after they’d got the initial hisses, snarls and cuffs out of the way – had decided to ingratiate himself with Madam by licking her. Sometimes she licked back, but most of the time she just laid there and took it.

“Such a pillow princess,” Aziraphale said, stepping over the purring tangle on his way to the desk.

“Such a what now?”

“Pillow princess. I believe it’s a lesbian term for a passive partner.”

Crowley, feet up on the end of the sofa, peered over a copy of his new Hairy Bikers’ cookbook. “Since when was the cat a lesbian?”

Aziraphale adjusted his glasses and reached for his sherry. “Well, I don’t know the entire particulars of her romantic life,” he said. “But ever since the other one moved in there’s been a significant amount of feasting with panthers, as dear old Oscar would have it.”

“Shut up,” said Crowley, who had named the tabby while watching one of his favourite car movies – _Bullitt_. “Steve’s a boy.”

“No, dear. Steve is very much a girl.”

Crowley frowned at the cats. Madam lay sprawled on her back while Steve groomed her fuzzy underbelly with his – or her – tongue. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure,” said Aziraphale, who had always been much better with animals than Crowley. “And the vet thinks so, too.”

“Great,” said Crowley. “Now I’m going to have to rename her.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because she can’t be named Steve, can she?”

“Why not? It’s a perfectly good name for a cat.”

“A _boy_ cat.”

“Oh, she’s fine with it,” said Aziraphale. “She answers to Steve. For all we know she might be non-binary.”

“Non-what?”

“I think that’s what they’re calling it these days. When you’re not particularly one gender or another or some days you wake up feeling like you might be both.”

“What?” said Crowley. “Like us?”

“Yes. They have a name for it these days. Even a ticky box on forms so that I don’t have to write ‘yes?’ in the box where it says gender.” Aziraphale settled back in his chair, glasses sliding down his nose. “It’s so _nice_ to be included.”

Crowley went quiet, wondering if it would be worth his while to broach the subject of gender, or rather sex. He’d always been curious about Aziraphale’s feminine side, mostly because Aziraphale was notoriously coy about slipping into something a bit more female. The boobs, Crowley felt sure, would be absolutely spectacular.

He was about to reach for the cookbook again but the Schubert crackling away on Aziraphale’s gramophone had come to an end, and in the ensuing silence the licking sounds from the cat basket suddenly sounded extremely loud and lewdly sapphic. Crowley glanced over at the animals and startled. Madam was almost completely white. No, not white. Beige. A sort of dark off-white, tipped with shades of cream and gold that looked oddly familiar for some reason.

“Stop it,” said Crowley.

“Stop what?” said Aziraphale.

“No, not you,” said Crowley. “The cat. She’s turning beige. Probably on purpose.”

“To what end?” said Aziraphale. “To annoy you? Because that’s not possib…oh.”

“What?”

The cat lay with her feet in the air and her head tipped back, so that Crowley could only see the fluffy white bib beneath her chin. From his chair Aziraphale had a different view, and (finally) it seemed like he’d seen something strange.

“Her _eyes_ ,” said Aziraphale, and got up and scooped the cat out of the basket. “Look.”

The cat’s eyes – previously a freckled greenish-yellow – were now a clear and brilliant blue. Crowley took it all in – blue eyed angel, blue eyed cat, beige cat, beige…angel? “What the fuck?” he said. “She’s turning into you.”

“Excuse me?” said Aziraphale, as his feline doppelganger butted him affectionately under the chin. No, there was no question about it anymore. Now that Crowley saw it he was amazed he hadn’t spotted it sooner. “What are you talking about?”

“Angel, look. That cat used to be a regular tortoiseshell moggy. Now look at her. She’s blue eyed, beige, and fluffy. She’s turned into the cat version of _you_.”

Aziraphale frowned down at the cat in his arms and then glanced into one of his many cherub-infested mirrors. “Well, that’s…flattering,” he said. “Or disturbing. I’m not sure which. I wonder what possessed her to do that?”

“I’ve no idea. As far as I know it’s not something that cats regularly do.”

Aziraphale suddenly looked pleased with himself, in a way that Crowley knew from long experience that whatever came out of his mouth next was going to be confusing, at the very least. “Perhaps it’s like an algorithm,” he said.

“A what?”

“An algorithm. Like the online thingy. It gauges what you like and gives you more of that.”

Crowley was about to say something along the lines of ‘algorithms don’t work that way and it’s called the _internet_ , Aziraphale’, but then he remembered a gloomy Saturday teatime at the end of the world. And how much more stressful the ensuing apocalypse was going to be if that dog – a small scruffy, black and white mongrel with one ear that kept turning inside out – wouldn’t stop fucking barking. “Huh,” he said, instead. “The Hellhound.”

“Exactly,” said Aziraphale. “You said it was a huge slobbering monster of a thing straight out of _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ , but instead there was…that. A sweet, scampery little terrier.”

“Yeah. Because the kid was the Antichrist,” said Crowley. “He could bend reality to his will without even knowing he was doing it. _I_ don’t have that kind of power.”

“Don’t you?” said Aziraphale, and the cat purred loudly in his arms. “Love is a very powerful thing.”

“Stop looking at me like that,” said Crowley, because Aziraphale was doing that glowy thing again, like he was smiling from under an invisible halo. “You’re going to make me go all stupid.”

Aziraphale let the cat down and drifted past on his way to the drinks cabinet. “Go, dear?” he said, planting a kiss on Crowley’s half open mouth as he went.

It took Crowley a minute. “You’re awful.”

“You love me,” said Aziraphale, and reached for the Bombay Sapphire.

Later that night it snowed, and Crowley – who hated the cold – slept warm in the arms of an angel. In the morning Aziraphale brought him coffee in bed and told him to stay there as long as he liked, but there was no real point staying in bed alone. Crowley got up and showered and shivered in the old Edwardian tub, and wondered if his next adventure in attempting to domesticate Aziraphale should involve underfloor heating of some sort. After all, he’d more or less got the kitchen exactly the way he liked it, and Aziraphale was very fond of wallowing in the bath with a big glass of wine and a bad romance novel. “If he won’t dream me a Jacuzzi then maybe we should get one of those bubble jet things for the bath,” Crowley said to his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. “And one of those rainforest shower heads like they had at that place in Brighton.”

He poured himself another cup of coffee and went downstairs, to find that the sign had arrived. Aziraphale, who was scrupulous about not opening other people’s post, sat eyeing it with deep suspicion.

“Is that what I think it is?” he said.

“No,” said Crowley. “It’s a set of skis. I was thinking of taking up winter sports, just as a sort of a riff on that whole ‘chilly day in Hell’ thing, you know?”

“You’re not funny,” said Aziraphale.

Crowley kissed him on the side of the mouth and grabbed a pair of scissors from the desk caddy. “I’m hilarious, and you know it.” He headed for the sign and Aziraphale swivelled in his chair, still looking dubious.

“It’s not that much longer than the old one,” he said. “Shouldn’t it be longer, if it has more letters?”

“More letters?”

“If it has _both_ of our names on it…”

Crowley hesitated, scissors still in hand. He wondered if he’d made the right choice, or whether he was about to face an angel’s wrath. Or worse, an angel’s slight miffage, which was about as close to wrath as Aziraphale ever got, but was still pretty damn uncomfortable. He cut through the plastic tapes holding the cardboard around the sign, and it fell away. The sign said simply _Books & Things, Est. 1800._

Aziraphale blinked at it. Crowley felt his mouth go dry and started talking. Fast. “I thought it would settle the argument,” he said. “If neither of our names was on the thing.”

“And things?” said Aziraphale, tracing the line of the ampersand – a coiled black and red snake with its tongue out – with his finger. Instead of a dot the lowercase i in _things_ wore a small, gold-leaf trimmed halo. “Books I can understand, but things? What are the things?”

“Technically we are,” said Crowley. “I mean, we’re not _human_ , are we?”

“But things? Are we things?”

Crowley shrugged. “Honestly, if people saw what we _really_ looked like then I think they’d be well within their rights to say that we were kind of…thingy.”

“Well, we’re supernatural entities,” said Aziraphale, looking nervewrackingly blank. Of all the times for him to develop a poker face it had to be now.

“Yeah, I know. But _Books & Supernatural Entities_ is bit long to put on the sign, and I thought you’d want something…snappy.” Crowley took a breath and waited for Aziraphale to say something. He didn’t. Just kept looking at the sign, his eyes shining in a way that could be either very bad or very good. “All right,” said Crowley, after what felt like a brief ice age. “Come on. If you’re going to go off, go off. I can’t stand the suspense anymore.”

Aziraphale moved closer. His eyes were wet, but a flicker of a smile danced in the shadows at the corners of his mouth. Okay, maybe it was the good kind of shiny after all. “I love it,” he said.

Crowley sagged in a sort of full body exhale. “You do?”

“Oh yes. I do. Very much.” Aziraphale cupped Crowley’s face and kissed him on the mouth. “I’m sorry I got so obsessive about it. It’s just that I’ve spent six thousand years pretending I didn’t know you, let alone love you. Forgive me if I want to shout it from the rooftops once in a while.”

“So…the sign?” said Crowley. “Shouty enough for you?”

Aziraphale scrunched his nose. “Well, not nearly as loud as I’d like,” he said. “But it’s a start.”

Doomed by his very nature, Crowley’s first instinct was to push his luck. “You know, if you want to start shouting from the rooftops, there are better ways to do it,” he said. “Like taking me out for drinks.”

“The Savoy?” said Aziraphale, rising sweetly to the bait.

“I was thinking maybe the cocktail bar at the Dorchester, actually.”

“If that’s what you want, dear.”

“It is,” said Crowley. “And you have to hold my hand, and show off your wedding ring, and tell strangers who don’t care that I’m your husband.”

“Oh, I can definitely do all of that,” said Aziraphale, slyly hooking a finger under Crowley’s belt. “Although I think it might be time to nip upstairs and remind the neighbours that we’re very happily married. In case they’ve forgotten.”

“I doubt it. The last time you got happy in that bedroom you caused a small earthquake and shut down the Northern Line for twenty-four hours. Again.”

Aziraphale smiled and snapped his fingers. The scenery changed abruptly. They were standing in their bedroom.

“Bit of a frivolous miracle, isn’t it?” said Crowley.

“I don’t care if it is,” said Aziraphale, pushing him onto the bed. “Now drop your drawers and start making a racket, please.”

Crowley did.

The next day they hung the sign. Aziraphale tweeted a picture of it and then immediately had a mild anxiety attack and started tweeting caveats.

> A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
> 
> NB – the previous tweet should not be construed as advertising. We are decidedly NOT in the bookselling business. Thank you.

“Do you think that’ll do it?” he said, blinking nervously in his phone. “Are all they all going to start _coming here_?”

“What? All three hundred of your Twitter followers?” said Crowley.

“It’s a legitimate concern.” Aziraphale started wringing his hands in that way that said lip biting and talking to himself couldn’t be far off. “Maybe I should go and boil some Brussels sprouts or something. Make the place smell unpleasant.”

Crowley picked up the phone and typed into it. “No,” he said. “Let’s not do that. There’s a much easier way to do that these days.”

“What do you mean?”

“Technology, angel,” said Crowley, tossing himself down on the couch and patting the seat beside him. Aziraphale sat, and paid attention. “Work smart, not hard. If you want to not-sell books you can do it online now. You don’t have to spend all day simmering brassicas and looking hostile – _not_ that you aren’t extremely good at it, mind you.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Not at all. Sometimes you’re so unfriendly I find myself taking notes. I can’t manage that level of glare and I’m a demon, for fuck’s sake.”

“Well, you’re very approachable with it, dear.”

“I know,” said Crowley. “It’s a problem.” He tapped at the phone and showed Aziraphale. “Here we are. Business reviews. Yelp and such. People come by your shop, look around, sometimes buy something, and give you a review from one to five.”

Aziraphale adjusted his glasses and frowned. “Really? How importunate.”

“Yeah, it’s quite rude, but here’s the thing. Nobody actually knows who’s writing these reviews. You could, for example, write some of them yourself.”

“What? Write glowing reviews for my own bookshop? That seems…dishonest.”

“No, dope,” said Crowley, already typing. “The opposite. Watch and learn.” He typed for a couple more moments and then showed Aziraphale.

“ _AZ Fell & Co, Greek Street, Soho,_” Aziraphale read. “ _The only thing more confusing than the non-existent shelving system in this bookshop is the opening hours. Surly owners, none too clean, and smells like a reptile house for some unknown reason._ ” Aziraphale giggled and lit up in the strange way he always did whenever some kind of sanctioned dishonesty was on the menu. “Oh, I _see_.”

“Good, isn’t it?” said Crowley. “Nobody who reads that review is going to bother visiting this dump, which leaves us more time to do what we want to do.”

Aziraphale gave him a sidelong look. “And what do we want to do exactly?” he said.

“I’ll leave that up to your enormous and sex crazed imagination.” Crowley handed him the phone. “Here. You do one. One star, although sometimes you can pepper a couple of two stars in there if you’re feeling generous, and just to make it look convincing. Go off. Be savage.”

“Right you are,” said Aziraphale. He adjusted his glasses, hmmed and haaed at the webpage for a moment and then started tapping away on the screen. Crowley got up, and Steve – who had been looking for a way to insinuate herself into the conversation – leapt up and occupied the warm space left by his bottom on the sofa.

There. There it was again, that faint background hum of reality shifting to occupy a new configuration. It fizzed on the tip of Crowley’s tongue, but it didn’t bother him so much anymore. Not since the cat turned beige, anyway. He wandered off to the drinks cabinet in search of single malt and was pleased to find a bottle of Talisker that was almost old enough to vote.

Funny how things changed. He’d never imagined that Aziraphale would ever abandon that eighties chunk of computer in the corner and join the digital revolution, but Aziraphale had already got the hang of typing with only one thumb, largely due to the demands of the cats. “Here,” said Aziraphale, clearing his throat. “What do you think of this?”

“Hit me.”

“Okay. _AZ Fell & Co, Greek Street, Soho. Popped in on my lunch hour to pick up a copy of The DaVinci Code and was immediately lectured by a bad tempered bookseller about how the Priory of Sion never even existed and was actually something cooked up by bored French Structuralists who had spent too long a night on the cognac. I asked him how it was that a bookseller didn’t understand how fiction worked and he snapped back at me that he understood fiction very well, but what he didn’t understand was how anyone could tolerate more than a single paragraph of Dan Brown’s prose without vomiting blood. Needless to say, the service was appalling, to say nothing of the obscene statuary and what appeared to be an enormous black snake coiled on top of a table labelled ‘special offers’. If I could give this abject dustbin of a bookshop fewer than one star I would do so in a heartbeat. Avoid._” 

Crowley kissed the tips of his bunched fingertips like an Italian chef. “Magnifico.”

“You think so?”

“You’re a natural. Although maybe leave out the part about the obscene statuary.”

“Why? There’s penetration.”

“There is not penetration. We’ve been through this. It is a bridge in the marble.”

“What? Carved directly above the aggressor’s balls? That is a penis going into a bottom,” said Aziraphale. “I’m intimately familiar with such things and you can’t tell me otherwise.”

Crowley sighed. “I’m going to regret introducing you to sins of the flesh, aren’t I?” he said, handing Aziraphale a glass of Scotch.

“Oh, please. You didn’t introduce me. You merely…expanded my range.”

“I love you,” said Crowley, and Aziraphale smiled, glass in one hand, the other still petting the adoring, purring tabby. Her fur was turning black as night. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always for reading and commenting! Stay safe and take care of each other. <3


End file.
